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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room.

All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.

It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.

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The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law.

This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.

Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.

>Meanwhile our own innvative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.

So they sell a large part of their company to capital who can afford to acquire and defend IP. In this happy case they are only ground into 90% dust.

It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.

I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations.

That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.

> it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporations

ftfy

It ain't just patents

I think relying on trade secrets for many things would actually be an improvement over what we have now.

You could still keep your recipe secret, but someone else could come up with something similar with no risk.

Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.

You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.

> You can't put a NDA on a Patent.

On the patent itself, no. But on design docs, CAD files, source code, circuit diagrams, etc. you can, and it is common practice to require NDAs for anyone who has access to them. And in some cases copyright law is also used to protect them.

> Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.

This is already a reality at many companies, including large ones.

It's much easier to spread information now than in the past. NDAs are slow leaks if you don't keep your employees tightly monitored at all times. Or if they play War Thunder.

So make NDAs unenforceable.

Where I work it takes months of lawyers, just to understand of one idea we have is an infringement or not. Is a mined field, on purpose.

> it takes months of lawyers, just to understand if one idea we have is an infringement or not.

Even after that work, you don't know if your idea is infringing. All you have is a prediction on whether it will be found infringing if you are ever sued.

>It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.

Nowadays HFT technology is extremely competitive, with firms investing tens of millions in custom harder to achieve nanosecond latency improvements, but all this has happened entirely without patents. As an industry HFT is way less monopolised than tech, suggesting trade secrets alone are enough to achieve growth and competition.

I don't think I would use HFT as a stand-in for companies that produce useful goods or services.

I mean, with limiting the allowed use of force to guard secrets, we are probably nowhere near as at risk for the worst of the past? As you said, the competition to guard secrets could be quite severe, and they were not exactly good at knowing actual leaks of their secrets versus someone else independently arriving at them.

That is, I think having the assumption of independent discovery would go a long way to preventing abuse.

I could see some hazard that small shops can't protect their secrets from partner manufacturers and such. But that is exactly where we are with a lot of stuff today?

Ah yes, if only murder had been illegal back then! Yes, making murder illegal must have been what was missing.

Sorry, but your argument has a bit of a silly premise.

That is silly. My point was that we have better law enforcement period. Are we currently perfect? Of course not. But to use that as your argument is, amusingly, a silly premise for an argument.

Yes, that's why the people behind the United whistle blower "suicide" or the Epstein "suicide" we promptly brought to justice /s

Our law enforcement is "better" when it comes to enforcing the law against the lower 99%. When it comes to enforcing it against the kind of people who're actually likely to kill to protect their secrets...good luck

I would expect things like this were far more prevalent in previous times. Like, comically so.

Again, we should continue to push for better things. But don't ignore how much better we are from where we were.

(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid.

This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a patent for a very long time would only be possible if it brings gobs of money, end even so, only for a reasonably limited time, because on 15th year the fee would be $10,737,418,240.

This is actually a ... solid idea upon short consideration!

I like it! Thank you for posting it: I hadn't seen it before.

This is an excellent idea. I would still limit the time though. Also inflation should be taken into account (maybe) not that in 10 years 10M dollars is a chocolate.

Thanks! The idea is not mine :)

I think that the exponent grows so fast that it completely dwarfs normal inflation. If the inflation goes out of hand, Zimbabwe-style, then I won't expect patent enforcement to matter or work either. But well, a term like 15-20 years could be added just in case.

That still seems pretty easy to game by re-filing slight variations of the original patents

Won't these be invalidated by having prior art already in public domain?

That would only protect those variations, not the previously published original version. And if the variations are too obvious you could even challenge their patents with a good chance of overturning them (which brings us back to the issue of the legal system being too slow and expensive)

Why not make it so there is a limit to how many patents you can hold? So if you have 10 patents, to register an 11th patent you need to release one of the patents you already have.

Who is "you"? The company? The subcompany? The CEO? Each individual employee? Patsy #1281?

Pointless as you could easily diversify by having your family members be official patent holders

The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation.

Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In absence of that, perhaps the patent fees could go to a revenue-neutral system where successfully overturning patents as a private citizen results in getting a share of the total pool of filing and renewal fees.

Just deny the same patents and put a exponential fee for resubmitting if found to be the same patents.

The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)

It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.

“ In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents”

I think it’s overwhelmingly negative. They are killing innovation by small players and don’t produce much innovation compared to their size.

I feel like patents are nowadays only used for things that would be easy to reverse-engineer or must be made public anyway. You can't recreate any modern technology by looking at patents, from semiconductor manufacturing to food processing.

So if patents have lost their original purpose, I don't see any value left in perpetuating the system.

Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?

I know trade secret was much more important. Also the spirit of patents is to allow development by making all public.

But do they?! I’m tired of trying to extract useful information off patents, they are empty of content and full of BS is laywer language. Real important details are kept secret, as long as possible.

The current system is de facto not working properly. I’m not saying is the worst, or I have better ideas, but is clear that the system is being heavily abused in all corners.

> Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?

Pretty famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_glass#Island_of_Muran...

> Glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without permission from the government. Leaving without permission, or revealing trade secrets, was punishable by death

Though importantly this was enforced by state.

It could be lethal if a guild member attempted to share secrets or sell methods to a competitive guild. An example:

"In 1754 the State Inquisitors of Venice learned that a worker at Daniele Miotti's factory had fled abroad with a copy of his master's books. Fearing that he would divulge secrets—especially in Bohemia, where there were important glass factories—they ordered his death."

Source: Zecchin, P., (2025) “Una condanna a morte di dubbia utilità: Sarebbe stato molto grave, per i vetrai muranesi, se il seicentesco ricettario Miotti fosse caduto nelle mani dei Boemi?”, Journal of Glass Studies 66: 7. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jgs.6939

Just how widespread it was for violent and lethal actions to be carried out in pursuit of maintaining guild secrecy, the evidence is murky.

It seems pretty unlikely that guild secrets could be sustained against the modern internet in the absence of any legal protections. One disgruntled employee and your secrets are anonymously contributed to the Wikipedia article on your product.

And what is wrong with competition? If someone else makes a product or service better than you - why should you get the benefits and not him/her? The correct solution is to freely share all knowledge (IP). Open source is not perfect but it is a step in the right direction. P2P and torrents is another step in the right direction.

Yeah, people complain about AI companies "stealing" IP, but it's becoming accepted, both by judges and the US president [1].

I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...

It's a factor, but I also wonder whether the key morpheme there isn't the "mega" in "megacorps". If, say, entity A attempting to enforce IP against entity B had to pay fees proportional to the size ratio (e.g., Megacorp enforcing against Little Joe's Software requires a $1 billion fee from Megacorp), things would be different.

The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.

Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt.

Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.

That's an interesting idea, but I don't want to let small operators run roughshod over other small operators.

How do you propose it could ever be otherwise? Under this system it's hard to sue small entities, but under any system it's generally useless to sue small entities except as a harassment mechanism because they don't have any money to pay damages anyway.

If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players...

They need a drastic reform.

It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_:

- protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,

- is too long, yes

- DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties

- the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original.

As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate.

And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none.

---

More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.

>And obviously China is a global parasite.

Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.

Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.

Which is pretty much what patent law ends up being right? The patent holder telling the licensee the conditions.

The early US had pro-social goals such as democracy or freedom. And yes, they used slaves because there are no good guys in history or politics, there's various shades of bad.

Current China has anti-social goals such as total control of the population through technological means and expansion by conquest - see them harassing the legitimate government of all of Chine in Taiwan constantly with the military or trying to sink Philipino fishing boats with their warships (two crashed into each other recently). It is also currently committing genocide through both murder and sterilization.

So yeah, I am totally for considering them a parasite and treating them as such.

> - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,

That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.

The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.

All are workable, but with their own tradeoffs.

>That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.

It should.

>Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made.

So be it.

>The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.

Sounds amazing.

We don't need to go with the default vanilla options that are passed as inevitable...

>> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.

> It should.

Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income.

Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.

Why shouldn’t a band be permitted to do something similar, getting money now in exchange for future income and, at the same time, transferring the risk of their future product being a flop to a third party?

>Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income

I'm against those as well. Buy stuff after you can afford it.

>Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.

I'm against insurance companies too. Have a public insurance fund instead.

You could have a system that limits sale of IP to clearly defined capitalization, I.E. instead of "You own this IP for 20 years and get x% of profits in return for funding/publishing and giving my y% of profits" it could be "In return for funding/publishing in the next 5 years, you get x% of profits and I get y% of profits, but I still own my IP and your rights expire after a short period of not publishing.

AFAIK that's actually standard for writers: publishers usually license the IP for a period for a prescribed royalty blend and for publishing, and after a certain amount of time or if they don't publish the rights revert, and international/audio/digital rights are negotiated separately.

There's an argument for "What if I don't want to deal with capitalizing on this whatsoever and just want to sell it for a cash payment now because I literally don't want that to be my job," but even then there should probably be a minimum royalty along with the lump sum to protect against exploitation.

The other replies are good.

The general principle is inverting who has power. It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money whose primary business of redistributing money and taking a cut.

If they are allowed to ask for something, they will and because they have more power, they are able to pressure people into unfavorable deals. They don't need your band, there's plenty of others who will take the deal. But you need their money or someone else's but that somebody else will offer similar terms, unless those exploitative terms are illegal because people united against parasitism.

> It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money

I don't like the conclusion, but I've convinced myself that curating and selecting what is worth doing is actually the real work. Picking where the bridge is to go is more important than building it. So allocating money is the important work. It feels icky to me... but also inescapable.

How would people with money and no artistic talent know? If we're not talking about art but some other kind of productive work - again - money does not qualify them. It gives them the power to decide, it probably lets them cultivate a skill for knowing which investments are gonna make money and which are gonna lose it. But it does not qualify them to decide what is beneficial for others.

As for the analogy - who picks where it gets built? It better be an engineer. And just look at the mounf of work done by the engineer, the builders and some suit who rubber stamps it. Work and skill is what should be rewarded, not having money.

Oh, yeah, 5 upvotes and 2 comments, then suddenly 7 downvotes without any replies. Totally organic.

I'm really fascinated about heavy downvotes for your post because it makes a lot of sense.

I wonder who the people who show up to defend IP law are in these conversations. Why do it? What's the gain?

Who knows? Votes should be public, otherwise this is an easy way to make opinions less visible without having to provide any justification.

Sometimes very similar comments in favor of protecting producers get upvotes on one post and downvotes on another. I also started seeing a pattern - even if a particular comment ends up downvoted in the end, there's usually a few upvotes first, sometimes with comments, then downvotes quickly to get it negative and there's never any comments justifying it and few if any comments after it gets negative. This indicates downvoting works well to silence the discussion.

When you think about it, it really doesn't make much difference if it's a downvote-a-bot or not.

If it acts like a bot, walks like a bot, and quacks like a bot, it might as well be a bot.

Nobody's comments are read only by humans any more.

"protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work)"

> laughs in Capitalism

To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue.

You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point.

I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free.

Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them.

It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen.

Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood.

A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market.

No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.

The deal is supposed to be that there's a trade:

* You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while.

* Everyone gets the work in the end.

We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.

People who aren't rich already don't have any intellectual property anyway. The idea of nobody having them seems inherently more suitable insofar as someone could as it stands just ignore your property anyway with the primary difference in this hypothetical reality that instead of being able to copy you AND shut you down they just copy you.

Depending on what your your personal net worth percentile threshold is for the word "rich," there are tons of open source software authors who own intellectual property, release it under permissive licenses, and are not rich.

Intellectual property isn't some sort of elite, elusive thing. Anyone can make it.

Maybe the real problem is that easy low-hanging-fruit inventions attainable by individuals in the garage are long gone, and are now so capital intensive that it doesn't make sense to keep the system in hopes of protecting this fictional small inventor.

> Should... we just not care about that?

... Yes.

Speaking from the half of the crowd that actually produces intellectual property, no.

IP is always strong, because information does not behave like other goods. There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.

It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.

> There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.

It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux.

The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect.

Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).

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