Ask HN: What would happen if we did away with the patent system? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would happen if we did away with the patent system?

4 pointsAliAdams5 comments

To me at least there seems to be a general feeling of unhappiness about the current state of the patent system. I got to wondering what would happen if the patent system was completely abolished and thought it would be interesting to hear some other people's thoughts!

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Everyone would abuse it. The bigger companies have more resources and would do more of it. Economies of scale would come into it. R&D departments would change from finding new things, to cheapening/improving ideas of another company. After a few decades of less new ideas coming in, we'd start to notice the lack of innovation in what we buy (it would be in the headlines in a year). Trade secrets, commercial espionage, it wouldn't be pretty.

Not really. I recall Elon Musk saying in an interview that SpaceX doesn't patent anything. The really innovative R&D is not easy to copy.

That only works because no one else has access to SpaceX rockets to reverse engineer how its built and how it works.

Do you mean patents in general or just software patents?

A lot more competition, which means it will get a little harder for individual companies to compete, but it would be a lot better for the consumer. Competition is ultimately copying with a twist. That's how you get an "industry" or a market. All products in a market are 90 percent the same, because they are copying each other in order to compete. If each product was 100 percent unique, they wouldn't be in the same market anymore. They'd be in their own very different markets, because they would be very different products.

Think of the laptop market, or even the smartphone market. Isn't 90 percent of the technology in them essentially the same? Now imagine if every single piece of technology was radically different. They would be unrecognizable from each other, therefore completely different types of products.

So that's why competition is essentially copying with a twist. If patents, which are state-endorsed monopolies for certain specific technologies, were gone, this competition would increase.

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