Fed economists propose patents be abolished

It's true that patents are not having their intended effect, and the majority of revenue arising from the patent system ends up in the pockets of people who are not themselves innovators. And I emphasize that I agree with the point of the linked article -- patents should be abolished for the public good.

But consider the alternative of no patent protections. Someone who invented something like the laser or the transistor would have no protection against copying by others. The only way to gain an advantage from an invention would be to keep it secret, and that's not practical in most cases.

Notwithstanding that, I still think patents should be abolished, because on balance they do much more harm than good, and the alternative (including that described above) represents a clear improvement in dissemination of technology and scientific advances.

Here are some examples where an absence of patents would have produced a better outcome:

1. Cold Fusion. When Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann published the claim that they had achieved practical cold fusion, they didn't provide enough detail because they and their institution hoped to protect the ideas before full disclosure. The result was that many people wasted much time and effort trying and failing to duplicate their results. Eventually the claims were shown to be misguided, but this outcome would have been arrived at much sooner, were it not for the patent system and the possibility of a monopoly on the ideas.

2. The drug industry. The modern drug industry's business model relies almost entirely on the existence of patents. This has many adverse effects on medical science, including the introduction of essentially useless drugs, and faux research that only appears to support the efficacy of drugs that in fact aren't what they seem. Without patent protection, drug companies would have to change their business model to accommodate the sale of drugs whose value would rest with their actual effects rather than their association with a lucrative patent.

3. Software and idea patents. When I was issued my first patents years ago, they could only be granted for ideas that had been reduced to practice, in physical devices, not ideas, and not mathematics. Most of these rules have been put aside. In one notorious case, someone patented a "business plan" that essentially said if demand rose, you could raise prices. The patent was worded in a convoluted way that concealed the trivial nature of its claims, and the patent was issued.

The sad fact is that, because of the nature of modern patents and the volume of applications, the U.S. Patent Office is reduced to glancing at a submission and, if it's not obviously a scam or a perpetual motion machine, it will be rubber-stamped, and any consequences from the patent will have to be sorted out later by the courts.

Bottom line -- patents should be abolished. This is not to say they will be -- because of the social and economic influence of patent holders, that's a political issue, not a practical one. I can imagine a TV advertisement by a patent troll firm in which a lawyer in Western garb, tightly gripping a patent in his hands, says, "You can have my patent when you pry it from my cold dead fingers."