Comment by formulaT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by formulaT | Hacker News Reader

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I don't support the existence of software patents at all. That said, I also don't think the benefits of patents should be interpreted so narrowly, or that we should judge patents by the single criterion of their "actual" intent instead of these other benefits.

The other benefit is that it enables companies to do innovation where they would not have been able to keep the idea secret in the first place. E.g. a pharmaceutical drug whose chemical composition would be trivial to reverse engineer. In that case, the patent does not serve the purpose of making the knowledge public in exchange for a monopoly. What it does do, though, is incentivize innovation be rewarding the inventor with the "rights" to that idea.

The real problem with patents is when patents are of trivial things that anyone could have thought of without much effort. That is why I don't support any software patents, because it's so much easier to patent trivial things in the software world than the physical world.

The argument for actual intent is based on how it was sold to voters when the laws were first enacted. I think it's perfectly legit to judge patents on these terms.

If our primary interest is stating what the law should be, then how the law was originally sold to voters is a minor point. Very charitably, it might be argued that my views are different to the average voter, and so in a democracy I should argue for laws that reflect the opinions of voters. But if we were to reform the laws, the voters would be asked to make another choice, and I so would rather spend my effort in convincing lawmakers and voters based on all the arguments and evidence available.

Patents are in the Constitution, so they weren't "sold to voters" per se. In any case,like a lot of old legal things, they were conceived at a time when we didn't understand economics. It's perfectly legitimate to reinterpret old legal concepts in light of advances in economic theory.

Tort law, for example, predates the U.S., but today we have an economic understanding of what purpose it serves (addressing the negative externalities of risk-creating activities). It's perfectly legitimate to look at those modern economic models to decide how we interpret (and evolve) these existing laws. With regards to patents, we can understand them as a solution to free-rider problems. Regardless of what intuitive understandings motivated them in the first place, the laws should be interpreted with the economic model in mind today.

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