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How many cases do you know of that people were unable to advance the arts because of a patent?

For one concrete example, anyone who worked on data compression outside of purely academic areas has been harmed, and by extension their customers have been harmed, by early software patents in that area. The LZW patent (infamously associated with the .GIF file format) and IBM's patents on arithmetic coding both rendered entire fields of computer science radioactive for years.

It's perhaps even more enlightening to spend some thinking about what life would be like if everything that could be patented under the incredibly loose standards of the USPTO was patented. It's safe to say you wouldn't be able to afford the computer or tablet you're typing on, nor the Internet service necessary to convey your thoughts. But this argument is also moot because neither of those technologies would be available in their present form, at any price.

Your impression is likely based on what you hear in a) tech media, which is largely supported by ads and hence welcome rage-views, and b) tech forums like this where open source is the dominant religion.

My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.

I'll give you some numbers less than 1% of patents are ever asserted

How many land mines ever explode? Does that make land mines a good thing? Patents are intellectual land mines, nothing more, nothing less.

I'm looking at actual data. You are speaking from hearsay and anecdotes. Here's a paper to get started with. It is a review of dozens of papers most of which have empirical results:

http://eml.berkeley.edu//~bhhall/papers/HallHarhoff12_NBER_w...

Your example is not concrete. What you think of as "radioactive" could simply be researchers concluding that specific area was not worth exploring anymore. Here's how you can give a concrete example: Those patents have expired. Can you point to any new fundamentally significant compression technology that has since emerged that could have been thought of as being previously held back by those patents?

Now I can give a concrete example of how those very same patents caused innovation: When they sued people over lzw in gifs, that prompted people to develop alternate methods like PNG. Sounds like progress to me. Was it forced innovation? Sure! But that's always been one of the rationalizations of patents. People often don't innovate unless forced to.

>My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.

So let's get even more anecdotal: how often have you been unable to "advance the arts" due to a patent?

> How many land mines ever explode?

How many good ideas get ripped off with their creator getting nothing in return? If we want to be hyperbolic, I could just say "anti-patent people are just intellectual thieves, nothing more, nothing less"?

You're looking at the wrong data. Progress is easily impeded without actual lawsuits.

The RSA patent held back crypto progress for decades. I don't know if there were any lawsuits.

Likewise for the GIF patent.

Still today patents on JPEG2000 are preventing its adoption.

H.264 patents slowed progress on web technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Controversies

The "dark matter of millions of active patents out there" is an apt description of failure. The constitutional purpose of patents was to disclose inventions that others could build on. If that purpose were being fulfilled we'd be browsing the patent database instead of all the places we actually go when we want to pick up a new technique.

I extend the same challenge to CamperBob2 above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977378

Give concrete examples instead of vague generalizations. I just have an example of how the GIF patent actually provoked progress as it was used to sure people who were using it without remuneration to the creators.

Image compression experts say JPEG2000 is simply not used because it's just not enough of an improvement to make it worth the hassle. Patent issues are secondary. And note that patents did not prevent it from bruin developed in the first place.

H.264 patents did not slow down development of new technology, it just slowed adoption of existing technology (h.264) in a different existing environment (browsers) Would you really qualify using the same technology in a browser as a significant technical innovation?

So coming back to my challenge: Now that the RSA patent has expired in 2000, 15 years ago, what novel developments can you point to that you can say was blocked by the patent?

Your metrics are the percentage of patents asserted and how many make it to trial? You don't even consider the amount of settlements that happened for obvious universal technologies, or perhaps more importantly the number of uses of a patent to implement something useful which could not have been developed independently.

You're asking to assume patents are useful until proven otherwise, and waving your hands about cherry-picking, when in fact you'd have to cherry-pick pretty severely to find an example of a software patent which would stand up to an honest evaluation of its novelty. This is because software is not created by lone inventors having eureka moments behind closed doors—the state of the art is pushed forward primarily through massive collaboration. The vast majority of software patents only exist because software and mathematics are arcane topics that the patent office doesn't have the expertise to understand or the incentive to evaluate honestly.

Software patents and IP are not natural laws with inherent value. It is not for us to empirically prove their harm, rather they are specific legal constructs designed for the public good, and thus their good must be justified, not the other way around.

> I'll give you some numbers less than 1% of patents are ever asserted, and only a fraction of them make it to a trial. The vast majority of patents lie fallow because there is no demand for their technology in the market. Now does that look like a serious problem anymore?

It sounds like you are arguing to abolish patents. The rest of the world is held hostage for under 1% of the patents issued? It doesn't sound like a serious problem to just do away with then all according to your stats.