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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

The patent system is an antiquated institution [1] that makes about as much sense in today's context as the poorhouse or the court of Star Chamber. It grants random [2] and vague monopolies that bear no relation to the development effort (if any) and take no consideration of economic harm to competitors and the consumers at large. Whatever little good it once held has long ago been smothered in a complex web of rent-seeking and legalese gotcha. It should just be scrapped altogether at this point (without even considering any immediate replacement).

[1] Dating to the 1624 English Statute of Monopolies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies

[2] For a classic example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray#Elisha_Gray_and_the...

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Here is another example of patent sclerosis: patents used to hinder development of steam engines in the late 1700's: http://mises.org/daily/3280/ . Patents have been a hindrance to technology for over 200 years.

Patents undoubtedly hinder the development of certain technologies. They almost surely incentivize the development of other technologies (e.g. drugs, chemical formulations). It is far from clear to me that the complete abolishment of patents would be a net positive development for society.

Trade secrets go a long way towards covering such cases. Coca Cola is a good example of this working for a very common chemical formulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula#Physical_secu...

No they don't. Chemical agents (e.g. detergents) and drugs are often very cheap to reverse engineer, compared to the cost of developing them originally.

Yup. There are a few fields of innovation where reverse engineering is cheap. The patent system prevents some of that reverse engineering in a rather costly and ineffective manner. (Think China.) It also prevents companies from working on technologies they think might be in development somewhere else (because they'll probably lose the patent), generates huge legal expenses, and completely perverts innovation in a lot of other fields, such as software. Is it worthwhile to bear these immense costs for the sake of a few chemical giants and the doubtful efficiency of their research processes?

Medicine (and the quality of life it brings) is a moral and ethical imperative. Why should we leave something so important to market forces? Why must the development of medicine be incentivized by profit?

What alternative do you suggest? Markets have their failures, but so do governments, etc.

Because otherwise it doesn't happen to any great extent.

If you continue all drug-funding efforts via your insurance company, etc, the way things are done will never change.

If instead we pooled the money we would spend and payed the companies to do the research directly they wouldn't deserve ownership (it being work-for-hire) and society would directly benefit.

Besides, it's not like patents work. Too often a real inventor loses all protection because of a filing error, and too often patents just enable squatting.

If patents weren't absolutely horrible for business and consumers we'd need to figure out a better replacement. But the way it is even just removing them totally would be better for everyone except abusers.

You can't just say something is an antiquated institution, and reference a wikipedia article just because a very similar system, successful or not, has existed for a very long time. By that logic:

Democracy is an antiquated institution [1] that makes about as much sense in today's context as ...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy

I'm not a huge fan of patents either, but let's try to pretend to be a bit more objective and sane about the arguments we are proposing and use some relevant references when making a claim like that.

I'm sorry, but that's an invalid comparison. We don't get our democracy straight from the Athenians. There was a two thousand year break in between, and our actual institutions that implement democracy are very different from the Athenian ones. (It was not a representative government. Office holders were chosen by lots. Citizens voted directly for legislative measures and even judiciary punishment. There was nowhere near universal suffrage etc.) Whereas the patent system in the US (and pretty much every other country) derives directly from the 1624 Statute of Monopolies, with a number of ad-hoc tweaks that were added and greatly multiplied along the way. The whole structure has become unwieldy and horribly unsuitable for modern technological development. (Unlike political representation, which might be somewhat facilitated by new technology but remains unchanged in its fundamentals.)

For a counterpoint, see the article in this month's business week about former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins's new venture. Basically, he invested $90 million in developing new LED's that used a silicon substrate instead of a much more expensive sapphire substrate. He discusses the dangers of the Chinese stealing the idea, and comments positively on holding the patents to protect that investment from copying.

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