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The Law of Unintended Consequences: Patents
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Sep 14, 2005 10:53 PM
from the one-thing-leads-to-another dept.
from the one-thing-leads-to-another dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Fortune has an
interesting article about the relationship between patent law and innovation. It compares the biotech industry with the computer industry and discusses the effects of the Bayh-Dole amdendment, which has allowed universities to make a lot of cash. But in the process innovation and scientific collaboration seem to have been stifled."
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What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Funny)
Where would we be then?
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Funny)
Where would we be then?
Moving faster than the speed of light, that's where we'd be.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:3, Informative)
The irony in this case is that the Bayh-Dole Act has almost nothing to do with patents. The overlap is essentially nil. Before the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, universities could patent inventions; after the Act, universities can still patent inventions, in exactly the same manner (foregoing the completely unrelated changes in patent law.)
What the Bayh-Dole Act changed is who gets to commercialize federally-funded inventions.
Before the Act, all in
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, you didn't read the article or get the point.
While Bayh-Dole was about commercialization of products developed with federal funding by universities (not particularly onerous a concept if you accept the basic concept of the state in the first place), the "unintended consequence" was patent legal wars - which are a direct result of there being patents.
And then you have the nerve to talk about pharma - which is exactly the point and example of the article.
RTFA next time.
And yes, you DO pay twice (or X or multiple times X) when the company is granted a monopoly on a drug invented by someone else. The issue - and the point of the problem the article has with Bayh-Dole - is that those with patent monopolies tend NOT to license or cross-license their products - which raises the cost of those products to monopoly rates and limits the spread of the IP - which is supposed to be the point of patents in the first place.
Just because patents are supposed to grant you a monopoly, that monopoly is supposed to be limited in time and subject to the provision that the IP gets licensed to all comers, so invention and distribution are both served.
Of course, it doesn't work that way. Monopoly is monopoly - I get it all, you get nothing. That's how humans work when they can use the coercive power of the state in their favor.
In a TRUE free market, you take your chances and the only thing keeping you from bankruptcy is smarts and speed.
And that's how it SHOULD be - raw evolution in action.
You monkeys just can't handle that, however.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Interesting)
I did RTFA. Like all Fortune articles, it's ten pages long, comprising four pages of anecdotes, two pages of buzz-clip quotes, four pages of unsupported supposition, and zero pages of logical reasoning. Fortune caters to the C?O set, so it eschews attention-span-draining critical analysis for talking points.
And yes, you DO pay twice (or X or multiple times X) when the company is granted a monopoly on a drug invented by someone else. The issue - and the point of the problem the article has with Bayh-Dole - is that those with patent monopolies tend NOT to license or cross-license their products - which raises the cost of those products to monopoly rates and limits the spread of the IP - which is supposed to be the point of patents in the first place.
Of course they don't license their products. If you spent $5 billion developing and testing a new drug, would you let your competitors buy the rights to sell their own versions? And if you did, how quickly do you think your company's investors - the people who paid money to help build your company - would sell their stocks and run?
Again, I'm not here to defend the pharmaceutical industry, which I view as undeniably corrupt. But their product strategy is simple reality, owing to the very simple fact that copying is easier than innovating. Isn't that why everyone (rightly) criticizes Microsoft - because it lets everyone else take the R&D risks, and then just copies their ideas? (Stacker/DoubleSpace, Netscape/IE, Eudora/Outlook, WordPerfect/Word, etc.)
- David Stein
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, lets get to the reality of patents. First there is no NEED whatsoever to spend 5 billion to develop a test a drug! 5 billion is 5 billion! The argument that you need so much money to bring out a drug is bogus! The biotech industry can do with less, but because it is so easy to pump the clientel it is done!
I detest patents because they don't promote innovation. Cars became popular because a Mr Henry Ford broke the car patent and mass produced a car! It is possible to earn money in an pure competition world.
The reason why biotech is different is because it deals with the lives of humans, and that is why I don't agree with patenting of drugs. I like capitalism, but bio-tech is a vulture preying on the lives of humans. They say, "Oh you want to live? Well here is a drug, but guess what it is going to cost you!" That, my friend, is very scummy! Again not against those that want to earn money, but reasonable money like all other industries!
I am glad that you mentioned Microsoft. First yeah sure Microsoft copies, but Netscape was not the original maker of the web browser, neither was Eudora, neither was WordPerfect. If you accurately check your history books before Netscape was what Tim Berners Lee wrote, before WordPerfect was Wordstart, and the list continues.
In other words you have proved the argument that by copying we get a vibrant industry! You get real innovation! Because copying is evolution as multiple ideas are combined to create a new idea!
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously. Do you do any kind of research before you make such ridiculous statements?
Do you know anything about the path between licensing a drug concept from a university, and actually putting a drug on the market? In part, it involves:
By necessity, this is a lengthy, complex, costly process. If you shortcut the process, you get, you know, thalidomide.
I detest patents because they don't promote innovation. Cars became popular because a Mr Henry Ford broke the car patent and mass produced a car!
Your example is not an example of a "patent-free world." It's an example of a deceptive patent system that lures a company to develop a product by a promise of monopoly that turns out to be illusory. And you're right - that works very well... until those developer companies realize that it's consistently illusory, and stop developing new products. Then you're screwed.
I like capitalism, but bio-tech is a vulture preying on the lives of humans. They say, "Oh you want to live? Well here is a drug, but guess what it is going to cost you!"
For most Americans, the answer is: very little. Usually it's like a $2 co-pay, thanks to the miracles of health insurance and Medicare prescription drug benefits.
Of course, it's nowhere near this cheap. It's just that the costs are defrayed through other mechanisms. Those mechanisms absolutely need an overhaul - they're buckling under the weight of pharmaceutical company markups and other sleaziness - and we need to extend them to all Americans. But the drama you see in the sitution just doesn't exist for most Americans.
In other words you have proved the argument that by copying we get a vibrant industry! You get real innovation!
That's a more plausible argument in software, where the development costs are essentially nil. It's less persuasive in biotech because of the large initial costs.
In fact, the field of pharmaceuticals proves your suggestion catastrophically wrong. Do you have any idea how many great ideas for drug targets are unpatented, unexploited, and ready to be tried? Many thousands - probably closer to a million. We have hundreds of ideas for drugs that would probably cure every disease on the planet. They're not patentable, so they can be freely used!
In light of this fact, do smaller drug companies choose to develop new drugs based on them? No. They create knockoffs of Viagra and
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Insightful)
What part of LICENSING don't you understand?
You license so you can partake of the profits of everybody else selling your invention as well or better than you can yourself.
By not licensing, all you do is stimulate everyone else to come up with a better product - under a different patent - and put you out of business.
Read my lips. Patents don't last. No form of IP lasts. Monopolies that are not coercively protected by the state do not last. If you rely on a patent to make you money, you will shortly go out of business or spend most of your monopoly profits fighting legal battles in court.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of the pharm money is not spent on R&D. It's wasted on marketing, administration and inefficient production.
"But their product strategy is simple reality, owing to the very simple fact that copying is easier than innovating."
The very simple fact is that once you have a monopoly, marketing, lobbying and litigating is easier than either copying or innovating.
The very simple fact is that we're not getting even 20% efficiency out of the monopoly money we're paying.
The very simple fact is that we'd get more than five times as much R&D done for the same money we're spending today if we simply got rid of the patents, paid for the R&D outright and let generic producers run a competetive industry instead.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) Inventions are now patented which would not have been patented previously because researchers could not *automatically* get patents for federally-funded research. There was a complex process that wasn't invoked for relatively trivial or cumulative research.
(2) The change in law led to a cash grab, and a research culture in which universities encouraged staff to patent any new developments, even those growing out of collaborative research. This led to commercial barriers being formed (licensing) which inhibited research and industrial application.
(3) As a result of #2, the amount of research flowing back into the academic commons is being sharply reduced. This is also inhibiting research.
(4) As a result of #2 and #3, there is a visible and statistically significant reduction in the amount of innovation in the drug industry since 1980, measured in terms of the amount of significant new drugs being made available to the public, and those which are significant enough to merit fast-tracked approval.
So parent post is correct. You *do* pay twice, because you are paying licenses to use technology which was never previously patented because it grew out of the public domain and so there were greater barriers to patenting it because a bureaucratic approval process was required.
The argument is that the law made it possible to commercialize things which were not commonly commercialized before.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Insightful)
To put it clearly, US taxpayers pay twice from the taxpayer money the government earmarks for drug research AND the money that the taxpayer then spends on drugs.
What makes this even worse is that the drug companies then sell the drugs in countries such as Canada for less than what they sell it in the US. In that way, the US taxpayer is triple screwed over.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Insightful)
This implies that none of these drugs would have been developed without the act. Pharma wasn't exactly hurting before the act, and it's defintely not hurting now. Who wins? The American consumer doesn't, as they are subject to inflated drug prices.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I think there is still a case to be made that drug companies are getting something of a free ride at taxpayers' expense. Sure, they still have to invest money in bringing a drug to market, and paying for the trials to do that is expensive. But they do get a big break by the taxpayer footing the bill for much of the basic research. Perhaps drug companies that market medications based on publically funded research should have to pay back the cost of the research into the fund, so it can be used to pay for further research. That seems like a start at fair compensation for lowering their product development risk by several orders of magnitude.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Insightful)
Basic academic research is a phenomenally important beast - perhaps the most important component of our long-term economy and the long-term health of our nation. It's impossible to overstate this or to use enough hyperbole here.
And contrary to the tiresome pop-culture tirades, America doesn't have a terrible shortage of scientists. We could use more, sure, but our labs are jam-packed with Ph.D.s and incoming students. In fact, we have a slight overabundance of them, which is reflected in their unappreciatively low salaries.
When I talk to scientists about the factors holding back their research - which I do frequently, in fact, as part of my job - I get a pretty consistent answer.
Grants are getting more competitive. While federal funding overall is growing, it hasn't kept pace with the explosion in life sciences research in labs across the country. Life sciences research complexity and data have experienced Moore's-Law-like rates of growth; just look at the sizes of GenBank and the Protein Data Bank over time. But because all universities are increasingly focusing on federal research dollars (in part because their academic rankings are based on it), it's becoming harder every year to get a grant funded. Scientists must show more data, and argue more convincingly that the research is useful.
Contributing factors:
The federal government has taken a stronger role in guiding research. A growing proportion of federal funds is earmarked for research on specific topics - e.g., AIDS or bioterrorism defenses. This necessarily diverts funds away from other areas of research.
Also, the administrative oversight of federal grants has grown. Universities are now held to much stricter rules about how those federal funds are spent. If a grant proposal indicates that a scientist will commit 40% of his employment to a project, he must actually commit that 40%. Funds must be carefully tracked by university admins - no more "I want to buy a Light Cycler with my unrelated grant money" discretionary BS.
These are real rules, and are strictly enforced. The penalties for violating them include paying the grant money back to the federal government, large penalty fines, and potentially getting barred from future federal funding. As a result, scientists and university admins have to spend tremendous time on administrative tasks - which detracts from research.
Those are the factors that scientists most frequently cite. Surely there are others.
- David Stein
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:5, Interesting)
A) Over the past 5 years, there are a huge increase in federal funding for basic research. Unfortunately, most of the money went to fund a few large-scale projects run by well-investigators--we're talking about guys who are already at the peak of the funding heap and don't really have to worry about their salary and their entire labs' salary and jobs depending on whether the grant submission scores in the top 9% (probably be funded), or outside of the top 12-15% (probably not funded). What I'm saying, long-windedly, is that much of the recent increase in NIH money made a few large-scale, high-profile projects even larger, at the very same time that young invenstigators were seeing a precipituous drop in the percent of acceptance for the smaller new investigator grants.
b) 6 years of grad school, a doctorate, and then you find out that you really aren't paid any better than losers straight from Party U--and THEY probably get health care. Raise your hand if you're ready to quit yet, since your first grant is going to be rejected anyway.
c) it never fucking ends. You can be president of the school and a nobel prize winner and so important that they've decided to make you the first human cloned, and your grant STILL only has a 10-18% chance of being funded.
So, um, I can't remember how this pertains to the patent thing. The key to remember, however, is that the Pharmas tend not to do the most productive basic research, so many of the potential drugs arise from federally-funded work a universities, where people are pursuing utterly novel stuff. It's good for the rest of us to provide a mechanism for the school to approach a biotech and offer that novel product in exchange for any possible royalties.
The only bad patents are patents on genes or part of the genome. Those are fucking stupid and people should be beaten.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, this:
> c) it never fucking ends. You can be president of
> the school and a nobel prize winner and so
> important that they've decided to make you the
> first human cloned, and your grant STILL only has
> a 10-18% chance of being funded.
this is good! Grants should be awarded on merit and not on who they are for.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense! Nothing stated without proof is undeniable. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite of that statement was made in the article - they state that these "useful" (new, better - esp. for cancer, not just rehashes) drugs are coming out at a SLOW rate, not in "hosts" . (honestly now, did you actually read it?).
Where are you getting these figures from? You're going to have to do better than that. How about the NME's or high-priority drugs (If you don't know the term RTFA)? Granted, the article states that 2004 was a bonanza year (without stating how much so) - but the previous years?
Let's get some figures from you.
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Insightful)
If your premise is correct, why were new drugs and treatments coming out before 1980? If your premise is correct that we'd be reduced to "a Wikipedia page" without this rampant patenting of everything, shouldn't that have been the state of things before it?
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:4, Funny)
In theory. But then you might accidently reinvent the Patent process and *bang* we've got Einstien again (re-again?)... AND a paradox.
Are you happy, now... urr... then?... um...
Parent
Re:What Are They Talking About? (Score:3, Informative)
The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Beyond the basic necessities of life the primary reason I need money is to pay for science and art supplies. For instance, I've been offered a gig as a cello player, but I don't happen to have a cello. That likely means I'll have to borrow money to obtain one, and get paid to recoup the expense, but I'll play the thing for free. Because. .
Likewise I did not study physics in college because it was the hot hiring field at the time. I did it because I "had to." I fully expected to have to patch the elbows on my tweed jackets out of economic necessity rather than fashion.
Give me money and I'll just blow it on something stupid like a French Horn or an Oscilliscope, so I can "do my thing."
I wrote a song awhile ago. It's a pretty good song. People request it and stuff. I didn't do it for money.
You see, there is this woman. . .
Aha! Now I think we're onto this motivational thing.
KFG
Parent
Re:Another example: totalitarian countries (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as art goes, not only you couldn't get rich, in many cases you could get yourself locked up. Still, all the Soviet block countries had very active unofficial art scenes.
Parent
Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes - scientists (myself included) would do it for the love.
Problem - in general a proect I work on or am involved with will burn $1 million before we have a good handle on whether it will work or not.
For a million, you better have the commercial side locked up before you risk it.
Parent
Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the even more fundamental problem is the assumption that a monopoly is an appropriate means to grant a return on investment.
The IP monopolies have many consequences; they have the same effect as taxes on specific products, slowing the economy, they create a disincentive for the adoption of newer technology, the create a disincentive to combine and join different research, they create a strong risk and roi based incentive to waste money on marketing instead of R&D, thus increasing economic waste in society and diverting money from wealth creating activities. They increase costs for the consumers, making the citizens globally less competetive, they increase costs for companies, making them globally less competetive, they increase costs for the state, making it less competetive, etc.
The larger the part of the economy that consists of monopoly powered industries, the more apparent the damage will become, leading to exactly the kind of consequences one can expect from the history of other monopoly-heavy economies.
Parent
Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this notion is there is NO WAY they can be SURE in ANY case that they CAN recoup their investment costs.
Even if you produce a cure for cancer, how the hell do you know some geek in some other company hasn't produced a cure for cancer that can be produced cheaper and works better than yours? And isn't covered by YOUR patent? (Which is why they want patents that cover ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.)
Risk is risk.
The problem is that most money men don't know how to handle risk. Why? Because money men are primates and risk is scare one for primates. They're money men because they believe money makes them better than anyone else and more able to trash anyone else, and that's the only psychology that matters to them.
The idea of taking actual RISK in discovering something new is simply anathema to these morons.
So they bribe the state to attempt to secure their fortunes. Which is what patents and copyrights are. It has nothing to do with "stimulating creativity" - that's bullshit.
Unfortunately (pun intended) it doesn't always work. Which is why the article discusses all the patent wars that erupted as a result of Bayh-Dole and why researchers now have to clear everything with their legal departments before saying a word about their research. And THAT is stifling creativity.
Parent
Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ... (Score:5, Informative)
Your post makes it sound like that's a requirement, and it is indeed in the Constitution. However, its enumeration is in the "Congress may" section, not "Congress must".
In context, it reads:
The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
It's not recognized as a fundamental right, like property, free speech, and freedom of religion-only as a power granted to Congress to exercise, and only GIVEN THAT the exercise of that power does indeed promote the progress of science and useful art. That point can (and will) be debated here, but I felt compelled to point out that the ability to exclusive control of an idea is not considered a right-it is enumerated as a fully revocable privilege which Congress -may- grant.
Parent
Biotech isn't computer tech (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense to cover biotech with patents, as it took significant effort to research and develop those things.
Computer tech, on the other hand, is primarily focused on automating processes. Computers are inherently faster than humans at doing repetitive tasks, especially in regards to calculations. But it is difficult to find a program that implements a process that doesn't exist already in another form, or that isn't blatantly obvious to everyone. Something like developing "a secure mechanism by which encrypted media data is stored on a device and available for playback when read and decrypted by the client application" would probably be a good candidate for a patent. "Users can click once and purchase an item without having to load the shopping cart menu" is both obvious and not really that far removed from the systems that preceded it.
That people get greedy and innovation slows down when companies are competing is just a small side-effect of the patent process.
Re:Biotech isn't computer tech (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, neither algorithms nor genes should be patentable. Ever. By anyone.
Parent
Patent Reform Act of 2005 to hurt innovation more (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? Because it sets limits on damages for willful and even fraudulent patent infringement so that large corporations will find patents easy to ignore.
Meanwhile, the limits are still big enough to remain a deterrant for small companies and independent inventors.
In other words, if you are a big corporations, you might be able to knowingly ignore patents while startups and inventors don't have the same benefit.
There are some good improvements in the Patent Reform Act of 2005 but this fundamental flaw is going to hurt innovation by making the patent system benefit a small percentage of companies at everyone else's expense.
Please write to your representatives and respectfully ask them to fix the flaws before it becomes law.
Re:Patent Reform Act of 2005 to hurt innovation mo (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Too much grease (Score:5, Interesting)
But too much grease in a gearbox bogs it down. That's what has happened with intellectual property in general. Those idiots in Washington listened to their corporate sponsors and believed what they said about the more the merrier.
At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, business and politicians will notice what the true innovators and researchers have long since learned the hard way, and cut back on the flow of grease. In the meantime, the rest of us are stuck with completely counterpdocutive IP legal wrangling getting in our way. It may take a long time to notice the drop in innovation and productivity, but I sure hope not.
Monopolies on problems vs. patents on solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if someone wants to question the patent system in biotech, then what's the alternative? Patents have, despite a few cases of misuse, been proven to be the suitable intellectual property rights regime in that field. In contrast, today's leading software companies like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP needed no patents at all during the first 10+ years of their existence. SAP only had a total of four patents a few years ago. It would be too simplistic to say that copyright law alone protects software because it's actually a combination of copyright, trade secrets, complexity, trade marks, and the possibility of converting a technological lead into sustainable economic value (by selling products, acquiring customers, building the brand identity of an innovator). That form of protection is much more dynamic than patents because it requires someone to actually market a product, as opposed to just sitting on a patent and waiting for others to unwillingly and unknowingly "infringe" upon it.
The other issue is who should own the outcome of the research work that is performed with tax money. I don't think it's reasonable to let the public pay twice for the same work, upfront by employing many such scientists for decades in each case (the fewest of which ever come up with something that can be commercialized on a large scale) and subsequently through patent royalties.
Re:Monopolies on problems vs. patents on solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents are government backed monopolies, so the alternative would be a free market. Research would
be payed for by the government. The government would be financed by taxing the products in the free market. Another option would be allowing patents but forbidding exclusive licenses.
The main point of the article is that it been a disaster. Did you read it? In fact the article is still pretty mild, it doesn't mention the many thousands of people that have died and are dying because of the high prices for drugs that can be cheaply produced (after the research has done).
The results of this 'suitable intellectual property rights regime' are at least as bad as those of Katrina. They just happen over a longer period of time and most of the dying is in far away places.
Parent
Ummm... Article argues against itself (Score:4, Insightful)
" A 1979 audit of government-held patents showed that fewer than 5% of some 28,000 discoveries--all of them made with the help of taxpayer money--had been developed, because no company was willing to risk the capital to commercialize them without owning title"
To all those in this thread that argue "scientists will do it for the love" or any of that crap. That sentence above says it all. Scientists might do it for the love, but companies won't pay to develop it. I work at a biotech company - we won't do stuff that won't make us money. We have to pay our salaries. If we do something that we DON'T have patent coverage on, our competition will just copy it at no cost to them... oh yeah - we will have spent A LOT of money to do the development. If we can't get an exclusive license, then for the most part we won't touch it. It WONT make financial sense to do so.
You can preach about "greater good of man" and all that. At the end of the day I just want to send my daughter to college and be able to go surfing. To do that, we have to make tools that help people, and I enjoy being part of that. I love solving the problems. I enjoy working on the projects. BUT - I have to eat and the company has to make money.
Ummm... Article argues against itself (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically, the Bayh-Dole law that the article talks about doesn't really say too much about companies being able/unable to patent the results of research that's been privately funded.
Even prior to the law, if you want to spend your money on research, you of course had the rights to patent the results. However, Bayh-Dole made it so that your company could spend tax-payer(read 'our') money to do research and development and then still be assured of your company owning the resulting intellectual property. So, the whole thing really seems like a big corporate well fair racket, whereby companies have been essentially gifted valuable IP by the American tax-payers.
Maybe the NIH or NSF should start acting a little bit like a VC firm in these cases. That is, if companies and/or universities want to profit by patenting the results of publicly funded research, then maybe the funding federal agency should get a proportion of the proceeds. That money could then be funded into other new and interesting research projects.
Parent
Re:Ummm... Article argues against itself (Score:4, Interesting)
In today's terms you could say the problem is trying to help the US GOV to better leverage it's patent portfolio. We have the technology now to handle so much more information that it should be possible to amend the law to say that the US does own patents on research it funds, then it could have an aution of patent rights. The whole problem was businesses were hesitent to create prodcuts without patent protection.
The current system instead GIVES AWAY ALL PATENTS that were previously owned by the governemtn and says we'll pay you to do the work, if you discover something good for you, keep the patent and make your millions. Imagine instead if the government kept the patent ownership but auctioned off potentially profitable patents for AT LEAST the cost of the funding, and split part of the profit with the scientists. Extermely useful or critical patents could be kept instead of being sold off if deemed necessary.
Suddenly scientists are back doing science, businesses get ownership of already completed research with patent protection, scientists get a nice bonus check every once in a while, and the fed actually makes money on scientific research getting potential profit from the sale of the patent instead of sitting on the patents rights until they expire.
Instead you create a new feedback loop where investing in science generates new discoveries that can be sold to businesses for at least the cost of the discoveries and you could turn that money into more funding for schools and more discoveries.
Then maybe we could move away from the current USPTO cash cow that creates such worthless patents lately.
Parent
insider perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Patenting programs (Score:4, Insightful)
Patenting physical devices (ever computer hardware) is fine by me, but patenting algorythms is comparable to patenting and restricting ways of thinking. Imagine what would happen if a law ordered people to think (or avoid thinking) in a certain way...
I am not saying that everything on the computer must be completely patent-free. I believe that only unique, sophisticated and unparalleled applications should be allowed to be patented by the US Patent Bureau, for a limited time.
- Matvei M.S
The real problem as I see it (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how accurate Judao-Christian scripture is about teaching about human nature. We see the result of greed in the dotcom bubble burst and we see the natural lack of general altruism all around us from the greedy bastards like Andrew Fastow that tanked Enron to the people now trying to scam FEMA and Red Cross by claiming to be refugees. Human nature toward economics is greed, not altruism and not enlightened self-interest. That is why both pure Capitalism and essentially all forms of Socialism have utterly failed.
The problem I have with long patents is that they subject the economy to the control of lazy, greedy men and women. I and other fiction bloggers are proof that you don't need a long monopoly on your ideas to want to produce literature, music and discover new ideas. I have probably about 25-30 pages worth of just fiction material up for free for the other Christian sci-fi fans that read it, yet I don't really care right now about making money off of it. My muse is Christ, what is your muse?
Shorter monopolies will light a fire under the asses of these people and force them to create new things. I hate to break it to the laissez faire purists, but the security afforded by these long monopolies breeds **sloth**, not creativity. Too many seem to have forgotten that old saying: necessity is the mother of all invention.
Re:The real problem as I see it (Score:4, Informative)
Software patents lack a critical part of this deal: reading the patent doesn't make it any easier to reimplement the idea. It's trivially easy to violate Amazon's One-Click patent without reading the patent, or even using Amazon's implementation - just saying "hey, wouldn't it be nice if customer billing information were stored so they could make a new purchase without re-entering anything?" should not be patentable, but currently, just about anything that satisfies that idea will probably violate the patent. The public gains nothing by being able to read the patent. With traditional patents, reading the patent tells you what you would need to know to reproduce the invention.
Sorry if that was a little incoherent; I'm tired.
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Meme Pool Circulation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Meme Pool Circulation (Score:4, Insightful)
The main complaint we have is that the PTO offers too many, too broad patents. Which forces innovators to work with too many lawyers for our productivity. Either to get one of those "paper patents" or be left behind, or to spin our wheels ensuring that someone else's paper patent doesn't interfere with our real invention. We feel that most patents we deal with are paper tigers with real teeth.
Most of us agree that hardware patents should require at least a testable working model, that software should be covered by copyright, not patents, and that business or procedure patents are a travesty. And that practically all patents last too long for the purpose of recouping investment, the basis of their artificial monopoly, while copyright lifetimes threaten not only innovation, but the sustainability of our culture.
That's what I mean by "the consensus". Not that no IP should be protected, but that the patent system currently threatens much more than it protects. And even the lawyers and financiers who read and write _Fortune_ magazine are starting to think that way.
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On Academia and Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Universities have evolved from public trusts into something closer to venture capital firms. What used to be a scientific community of free and open debate now often seems like a litigious scrum of data-hoarding and suspicion. And what's more, Americans are paying for it through the nose.
And who's to blame for that? Yup, the good old American system.
The fact of the matter is, America doesn't care about science. We worship things like actors and singers and sports figures and then snub our nose at scientists in academia and pay them crap. Business is the most popular major, not because it provides the most to society, but rather it is the most profitable. In other countries, scientists are looked up to and admired (for example, India).
In the US, the budgets have been cut drastically for academia (most grants are getting a 8% cut straight across the board this past year). Adjusting for inflation, the NIH and NSF budget's have actually shrunk over the past 10 years-- which is ridiculous considering the massive amounts of improvement in technology that have occured. With such a drastic decrease in available funds, researchers need to tighten their projects, search for alternative funding, and be wary of who they tell people what they are doing. Sharing data with someone you aren't collaborating with or on unpublished work is a sure way to find yourself out the door in academia. This is further being complicated by the fact that tenure reviews are starting to shift from the old paradigm of how many papers you published, to a newer paradigm of how much grant money you bring in (while this is usually correllated, it is not always the case).
It's not the scientists that have created the environment, it's the environment that has created the scientists. There's a reason why College Professors were listed as one of the top 5 undervalued professions in America. Patents are the one bone that academia gets and the writer seems to think that scientists are exploiting America. Academia is already losing a lot of great talent (and henceforth, progress) as it is in America due to lack of funding-- how do you think it would be if patents didn't exists?
Adjusted for Inflation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming those numbers are NOT adjusted for inflation, then 12 billion 1980 dollars = about 29 billion in 2003 dollars. Growing 29 billion to 179 billion is an 8% increase per year.
I also wonder if this is a linear increase or if there was something sudden jump at some point. Taking two data points and trying to make some sort of comparison other then "this one is bigger" seems rather dumb.
In 1980 I was single, but in 2003 I had a family of four. That doesn't mean I was reproducing at a rate of 6.2% per year.
Can someone point to a data source that has amount spent on drugs each year? I searched the web, but so far I don't see any sources I would trust, mostly stories similar to this.
Real unintended consequences--Mansfield Amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mansfield Amendment deliberately destroyed the relationship between the United States military and university basic research, so that instead of getting crumbs from a gargantuan Department of Defense budget, which meant the crumbs were quite substantial, basic research had to rely on the politically castrated National Science Foundation with no important constituency to push for funding.
Faced with the prospect of basic research almost completely disappearing, the only alternative was something similar to Bayh-Dole, because there was no way anymore to politically push through explicit funding. What an irony that now what were once considered public goods are now the property of the largest corporations and the rich only get richer. Now that is the true unintended consequence considering who initiated the Mansfield Amendment.
Patents? Innovation? No connection... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the debate about whether patents are stifling innovation or not misses an important point: that most inventions don't happen because an inventor suddenly invents a brilliant new gadget. The real way most things are invented is when somebody has a problem and solves it; and most often the person doesn't even think of it as anything special, because it isn't in that situation - it's just a handy solution to a problem, so he/she could get on with the job at hand. Later, perhaps, somebody combines a number of these solutions and it turns out to be a great idea.
I think people who are just 'inventors' are likely to be some sort of pathological phenomenon; a kind of obsessive tinkerers, perhaps.
As for patents - they certainly make it difficult for others to make money from their good ideas, and I have no doubt that at some point it will become too cumbersome; then it will change. But since people will always run in to new problems and look for solutions, innovation will happen.
Perhaps when it becomes clear enough that the patent system, with all the mindlessly stupid patents for trivial non-inventions, simply doesn't work, perhaps then will people begin to 'anti-patent' their inventions by immediately laying them out in the public domain; that way you at least ensure that nobody else can shut you out from making a fair earning from your good ideas.
Simple question (Score:4, Insightful)
The argument that only granting exclusive use of some specific piece of knowledge can make commercialising products based on the idea viable financially is unconvincing. (Leaving aside that this does not eliminate risk because competitive products based on other ideas may still appear.) If necessary, have a system where the government compensates organisations for development in certain cases (perhaps with tax breaks) to give an advantage to the original developer. But do not prevent others from making improvements.
The patent system adds huge costs for ephemeral benefits. Creativity and invention prosper in an atmosphere of freedom, not one of bureaucratic control.
Medicare Drug Benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
The odd thing about this sad state of affairs.... If I'm reading this right, the Federal Government retains royalty free rights to virtually all the research it has funded. Which means, at least in theory, it could seriously leverage its position to purchase drugs for the medicare prescription benefits. Something that has apparently not occured...
Which just goes to show who the politicians really represent.
Re:stand on the shoulders of (Score:3, Informative)