Hacker News Reader

Comment by htf | Hacker News Reader

I understand that allowing patents for algorithms is bad for innovation. What I don't understand is that people say that and then in the same breath claim that allowing patents for chemical formulas is good for innovation. In both cases, the patent holder gets a monopoly and everyone else is stuck with them as their supplier. I feel a terrible cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile these two positions.

View on HN

At the level of economic theory, patents are a solution to the free rider problem. They're based on the idea that it doesn't pay to invest in an invention if the fruits of that investment can be easily and cheaply copied by competitors, who can undercut the innovator because they don't have to recoup the investment.

The difference between certain software patents and chemical formulas is the level of investment required to develop the technology. If the level of investment is low, the free rider problem isn't nearly as relevant. If an invention is cheap, the cost can quickly be recouped just by being the first mover. This is especially true in the online space, where there are major network effects favoring the first mover.

Drug design is a completely different bag of cats. The initial investments are huge, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There are no network effects and being the first mover brings almost no advantage. Drug manufacturers can't compete on quality, they can't compete on anything other than the chemical formula itself and branding (and branding is the result of a different IP regime).

Developing an algorithm doesn't generally cost hundreds of millions. Developing a drug and taking it all the way through clinical trials easily can. I think patents make sense for some sectors. Software just isn't one of them.

I think cost is just part of it.

There is also the fact that for lots of things, software are being part of an ecosystem where people come to the same solutions naturally.

Think about the "swipe to unlock", when the only thing you have to interact is a touch screen, it's not like there is lots of different possibilities.

At that point patents become harmfull because it blocks other people from making progress and having competition in a given ecosystem.

Drugs just don't have the same collision of solutions problem.

> Think about the "swipe to unlock", when the only thing you have to interact is a touch screen, it's not like there is lots of different possibilities.

And this gets even more ridiculous when all you have to do to work around this is swipe inside a circle instead of on a straight line.

Patents work for protecting the investment in development and clinical trials, sure, but do they work optimally? Are there better ways to finance these processes?

Keep in mind that the cost way pay for these patents is a dramatically higher price for life-saving (or life-improving) treatments. Could we not cut out the middle-man and redirect a portion of those higher costs to fund research and clinical trials directly (i.e. in the form of taxes)?

A patent on a molecular structure is a very specific and easily interpreted patent. Most software patents are extremely vague and open to overly broad interpretations. The potential for abuse is far, far greater.

A friend working with polymers told me recently that their patents tend to be vague as well, in order to block as many variations and modifications to given formula as possible, while not revealing the exact chemical process used to obtain the polymer (e.g. saying that the temperature used is between XX and YY, instead of providing the exact value).

I'm not as familiar with polymer chemistry but I worked as a lab chemist in medicinal research and there there's really not much room for vagueness.

I think the problem is that software / algorithm patents have broader implications and abuses than patents for chemical formulas. They are also being granted for topics that many would consider obvious to those active in the field. The issue isn't protecting valid and specific invention from copying, it's the ease with which software / algorithm patents can be used to sue / bully others with legitimate (not copied) creative inventions. I think the ephemeral nature of software makes it inevitable that a patent eventually gets approved by an examiner if resubmitted enough times. A bogus chemical patent is probably easier to prove bogus.

Innovation is a function of incentives and reuse of prior innovation. Patents can raise financial incentives, but obstruct the use of existing ideas.

It shouldn't surprise us that some industries are more concerned with one piece than the other. It's quite pragmatic to argue that patents should vary by technology sector.

I wouldn't blame any legislator for thinking that the issue of software patents wasn't a real problem if the debates about were constantly lost to discussing its implications for drugs.

Software patents are a problem, specifically my problem because I'm in that field.

They can't be reconciled: patents bind another human down from thinking and acting and trading with his fellow human beings. There's no way to justify that; it's blatantly immoral.

Don't be so dramatic. By and large what patents prevent is copying: taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own. Most people consider this immoral too. Restrictions on unfair competition are literally hundreds of years old--it's not a recent invention.

E.g. one of Samsung's biggest problems in the recent patent dispute with Apple was that they were clearly blatantly copying Apple's designs.

>Most people consider this immoral too.

Morality is relative and totally arbitrary (and also influenced by the regime). Let's leave it out of the discussion.

>taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own.

Everybody knows that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Claiming ownership of most ideas flies in the face of historical fact. Patents try to reconcile this with prior art and tests of non-obviousness but these are often subjective and highly flawed.

> taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own.

It's incredible stupid that I can get sued for sitting down and working through a problem to a logical end just because someone, somewhere sat down and worked through the same logical steps. Physical inventions and chemical engineering make more sense but software patents...you're trying to patent a logical progression of ideas how does that make any sense at all?

There are other ways than patents to get rewards for your work, but patents are a non-starter in principle. Just because you thought of something first does not give you a right to stop someone else from thinking of it second. It's really very simple.

By and large, patents aren't intended for situations where it's likely that two people would think of the same design within the patent term. It's designed to address the situation where I spend time and money researching something, and someone else comes along and takes the results of that research and sells a competing product, undercutting me on price because he never had to invest that time or money.

How the system is intended to work is very different from how it actually works.

The path to hell is paved with "good" intentions. People have a responsibility of thinking through the consequences of their "good intentions."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com