Economists Argue Patent System Should Be Abolished 376
nukem996 writes "Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published a paper arguing that the American patent system should be abolished. The paper recognizes the harm the current patent system has caused not only to the technology sector but the health sector as well."
Been saying that... (Score:5, Insightful)
For years, but ain;t gonna happen. The big corps will buy the senators and reps to make sure it NEVER happens.
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There are industries where a severely limited patent system makes sense. Any industry that's too tightly regulated by government, so that barrier to entry is impossible, like pharma or telecom. Of course you could solve the same problem by pealing back the red tape as well. Competition in the free and open market is the only thing that truly breeds innovation. No free market, no competition. It's easy.
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There are industries where a severely limited patent system makes sense. Any industry that's too tightly regulated by government, so that barrier to entry is impossible, like pharma or telecom. Of course you could solve the same problem by pealing back the red tape as well. Competition in the free and open market is the only thing that truly breeds innovation. No free market, no competition. It's easy.
You live in a deluded fantasy that free market and zero regulation means honest brokers and business ventures. Grow up and get passed Friedman's fallacy along with Ayn Rand.
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Believing that capitalism generally works (it does, and this is historically verifiable) doesnt mean youre in bed with Ayn Rand or that it makes all involved moral actors.
He spoke of competition and innovation, not honest brokers. The beauty of capitalism is that it doesnt matter if youre honest or not, if you provide crappy service you will be out competed.
Re:Been saying that... (Score:5, Informative)
That's the case when you're the little guy, sure.
Once you start to get monopoly power, things get more interesting. In the absence of contrary regulation, you can prevent resellers or middlemen from handling competing products, preventing them from reaching market. You can get exclusive contracts on materials or infrastructure your competitors would need, driving up their costs and thus their prices; you can drive standards and make the creation of interchangeable or interoperable widgets unnecessarily expensive or complex... etc.
"The beauty of capitalism" works fine when the startup and infrastructure costs are small, the inputs widely available, the output truly fungible, and customers and suppliers unhindered in their ability to select the product they wish to carry or purchase. Here in the real world, we need regulation to ensure that the free market keeps working outside those ideal conditions.
Re:Been saying that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Been saying that... (Score:5, Insightful)
In an unregulated market, being honest means that your product/service will appear "crappy" when it is compared to something that it represented dishonestly. The biggest scam artist rises to the top.
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You live in a deluded fantasy that free market and zero regulation means honest brokers and business ventures. Grow up and get passed Friedman's fallacy along with Ayn Rand.
Your use of straw man arguments is an obvious sign of maturity...
Re:Been saying that... (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's never existed, never will exist and even Adam Smith saw that the government was going to have to be involved to keep the actors honest. And it should be obvious to anybody who's actually dealt with corporate enterprises that they're more interested in the immediate profits than what they can profit from a few years down the road. Assuming that they're not planning to dismantle the outfit and sell it off chunk by chunk.
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Although it is difficult to distinguish a free market from a free society, some try to make that distinction. For instance, the mere existence of government could be labeled as the removal or granting of freedom to some. It is all perspective. However, there is a attempt to separate free market from freedom. For instance, a sales or income tax, although it has an effect on the market, should not be viewed as infringement on the term free market. As long as the taxes are uniform and show no bias to cert
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The concept of having millions of outstanding shares in a single corporation is a rather new idea. It as similar to communism (except everyone owns an EQUAL share in the corporation) as free market capitalism.
I don't know how much I agree or disagree with the rest of this, but allow me to introduce you to Creative Finance 101.
While the stereotypical corporation may be that simple, often times real corporations have 2 categories of stock: common and preferred. Preferred stock is typically non-voting stock, but Preferred shareholders get paid off before common shareholders do in the even of liquidation.
On top of that, some companies may have differing classes of common stock, frequently designated as "A Shares, B
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Please explain how free market is a fallacy.
In a completely free market, the big fish will eat the small, and the player with the deepest pockets can own it and become a monopoly.
With a monopoly, the market forces cease to have meaning.
And this is indeed what we see - the biggest become bigger, and the small have no chance of competing, only of being bought and closed down so the monopolies and oligopolies can be maintained.
Re:Been saying that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Been saying that... (Score:4, Informative)
IBM, K-Mart, Hechts and Kodak didn't operate in free markets. They operated in regulated markets that enforced the lack of monopolies, along with other things that are detrimental to economic growth that the free market allows.
Re:Been saying that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Monopolies are rarely good things, but I have to wonder just how stable and bulletproof they are in reality. I think there is this Orwellian idea that the monopolies will take over and then history will end with their boot on our face forever.
However, as long as the government is not acting as the muscle for them, monopolies seem like they have a great deal of potential instabilities and vulnerabilities. Their pricing power and control of verticals and horizontal chains is daunting, but that sort of size tends to breed inefficiencies and creates blind spots. As long as there was no artificial legal barrier to entry, I think enterprising small companies could outmaneuver a monopoly. They would have to be smart and capable, of course, but it could be done.
Microsoft was actually declared a monopoly, but due to the extended battle, even that had little practical effect on their business or market share. So you have a bona-fide monopoly which easily survived anti-trust proceedings, which is now stumbling all over the place, even though the government didn't even touch them in any sort of effective manner. Even with its considerable market share and size, it is being outmaneuvered or left behind in every market that is not the console or the PC, which is to say, most new markets. That mechanic is why dominance is not something that you can ever take for granted.
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As long as there was no artificial legal barrier to entry, I think enterprising small companies could outmaneuver a monopoly.
You mean like patents?
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Sure, a newcomer might get lucky, or the monopolist could drop the ball. However a lot of damage can occur before that day arrives.
It's like saying the Nazis weren't so bad because eventually they overreached and the allies beat
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Hey here are some other examples:
Exon, Shell, Cargill, GE, Siemens, Bayer, BASF, Rockwell, Boeing, and the list goes on and on, and on...
I have not even started the fact that raw materials is now split into three major players; BHP, Glencore, and Rio.
So actually your argument is bogus, and there are way too many large corporations controlling too few resources. BTW google for the control influence poster that showed how few corporations control so much global wealth.
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In my town, Home Depot moved in and people boycotted the mofo. It's now a massive, empty eyesore of a building (it only lasted 8 months). That's a rarity, though, and the fact that such stores can basically carpet bomb the countryside and just shut down and say "meh" when they encounter such an (extremely rare) instance of community solidarity points to even deeper systemic flaws.
Re:Been saying that... (Score:5, Insightful)
We *think* we know what happens when there is a free market, but just like in the oceans, a natural equilibrium actually occurs where smaller species can coexist with larger ones, even predatory larger species. What we think is a free market has never been a free market. Big fish do eat small fish, but big fish can be brought down by smaller predators or parasites using the gigantic blind spots that big fish tend to develop as they evolve.
The problem with our current situation is that we have the government intervening to provide what is in effect, corporate welfare, as well as a safe, zoo-like environment. The big companies may naturally chafe at the confinement, but it also has the effect of the government keeping them from having to compete with other businesses.
Even the regulation itself breeds larger enterprises, as the regulations increase the need for economies of scale due to the need for each entity to have compliance and reporting units. Since each entity needs to report and comply, whether it is large or small, it is a greater cost for small companies to comply. And in the lucrative and incredibly regulated government sector, you can see this effect with huge companies growing up to service (and influence) the government.
The patents are also important because without patents, small companies can actually compete by taking the ideas of the larger companies and improving on them, or altering some aspect of service or marketing to differentiate. Since the company is small, it can only have strong effects locally, but due to their local focus, they could out-compete the larger enterprise in a more specific niche if the smaller entity can focus on some aspect that the larger entity cannot or will not deal with.
Patents, of course, allow the larger companies to use their corps of lawyers to enforce their business, instead of having to innovate and compete in their market segment against more agile smaller enterprises. And, of course, the ultimate result of patents like we have is the creation of companies that *only* enforce patents, and do nothing else, becoming full-fledged parasites.
Obviously, even without patents and regulation there are benefits to large businesses, but large businesses become calcified and unwieldy and their lower ability to compete on all fronts opens niches that small companies can grow in. As long as regulation, compliance and patent portfolios are there, large businesses can close those niches without actually having to compete in those niches.
Re:Been saying that... (Score:4, Interesting)
But a market isn't the same as an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, the predator doesn't want to exterminate all other species, he just wants to eat them. And the equilibrium arises due to the fact that anything that causes it to break down goes extinct - a predator that reproduced too fast and hunted too well would soon find itself without prey and die out.
In a completely free market a company doesn't seek to destroy every other company. Just those that compete with it. So you'd end up with an equilibrium where a number of big companies divided up the market, destroying any new company that tried to compete. They might also decide to go after each other, from time to time, but that would just lead to even bigger companies.
Patents started out as a way to encourage the sharing of knowledge. Instead of each company hoarding the results of their research, patents enabled them to share knowledge without having to give it away - sure the person they share it with can share it further, but the original company will still be compensated whenever someone uses the knowledge to make something,
But now patents are a way of stopping others from thinking things up. They no longer protect solutions, but problems.
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Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are obviously not in the medical business.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity. Regulation by the government (mostly for safety & efficacy) is just another business expense, like fuel, that all players pay. The price to enter the game.
I have spent over $1m with my partner over 5 years to develop a product and get it FDA cleared for sale with 3 patents. We simply would not have started this project without knowing we could patent what we do, because otherwise J&J and P&G would both copy our product starting the day we released it publicly.
There would then be almost no way to make our investment back at that point, without patents.
P&G and J&J can compete with us, but they can't do it by just copying. They will have to invent something even better that gets the results a different way. That is progress. Mankind has progressed this way at the fastest rate in the history of man, and virtually all of it in the last 200 years. Patents drive innovation. Ordinary citizens benefit from the release from drudgery as a result. It only took about a century to relieve about 80% of the population involved in hard physical farm work down to 5% of the population in farm work, supported mostly by farm machinery inventions.
I am sick of the lack of knowledge (lack in the education system) of how mankind has advanced and how the business process aids new products when people can spend years of hard work and spending of large sums of money with no guarantee at all of success, but knowing that if they can get limited time protection for their work they can then have a chance to profit.
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> No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation. Once the research is done, private companies can manufacture products. This would have several advantages.
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History does not warant a government-only solution. Indeed, it strongly suggests against it.
Typed from a smart phone that probably wouldn't exist even 75 years from now if left up to government.
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting, I do hope you realize that what you are reading, and what you using as a medium to communicate did come from the government. Please check your facts... Thank-you and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
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You mean the internet. Well, the argument isn't that government can never invent anything useful. It's that for the most part, they wouldn't invest in the right thing. Back when the internet was invented, no one except for government wanted (or needed) a fault resistant network, so government had to create one on its own. And fair dues, they invented something useful.
But would they have invested a smartphone? Unlikely
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IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation. Once the research is done, private companies can manufacture products. This would have several advantages.
While Pharmas have certainly made plenty of poor drug development decisions, having biologically illiterate congressmen pushing their own agendas wouldn't help. If we let them choose which drug targets and phase 0 - phase II drug candidates to throw billions of dollars at (and it would be those congresscritters pulling the strings no matter what august body they nominally put in charge) we would end up following their whims, resulting in the lost decade of magic beans autism cures followed by the lost decad
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Software has a multiplicity of components, it's virtually impossible to write any new software without infringing existing patents, since the ones we have are ridiculously broad. The scenario you describe is easy to encounter in the software world.
The best way to avoid this issue, as far as I can tell, is base your company value on brand and service rather than patented technology. As you say - a big patent holder can almost certainly torpedo any new software project if they want to. But they can't torpedo your brand or reputation in the same way. Which is probably one of the reasons for the whole Software As A Service fad - if you hide it behind a firewall and don't show the innards off, you're less likely to get sued for patented tech in those innards.
Better still, stop granting software patents. What constitutes "obvious to an ordinary practitioner" changes with such rapidity that the 20 year lifespan is just mental.
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Please at least read page 13 of the paper, and throw out your well preserved assumptions of how the world works.
- I'll give you a taste of page 13:
"There are four things that should be born in mind in thinking about the role
of patents in the pharmaceutical industry. First, patents are just one piece of a
set of complicated regulations that include requirements for clinical testing and
disclosure, along with grants of market exclusivity that function alongside patents.
Second, it is widely believed that in the absence of legal protections, generics would
hit the market side by side with the originals. This assumption is presumably based
on the observation that when patents expire, generics enter immediately. However,
this overlooks the fact that the generic manufacturers have had more than a decade
to reverse-engineer the product, study the market, and set up production lines.
Lanjouw’s (1998) study of India prior to the recent introduction of pharmaceutical
patents there indicates that it takes closer to four years to bring a product to market
after the original is introduced—in other words, the fifi rst-mover advantage in pharmaceuticals
is larger than is ordinarily imagined. Third, much development of
pharmaceutical products is done outside the private sector; in Boldrin and Levine
(2008b), we provide some details. Finally, the current system is not working well:
as Grootendorst, Hollis, Levine, Pogge, and Edwards (2011) point out, the most
notable current feature of pharmaceutical innovation is the huge “drought” in the
development of new products."
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Now I see I got caught a little by the flames, that usually burn around online discussions - pre-tty stupid.
While I agree, that patents seems like the only viable solution for the little guy to enter the market, it only holds true under the conditions currently existing in the market.
What the paper is trying to say, is that you could change things. I actually think that if we tried the solutions suggested in the paper, everybody would be better of, pate
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Can you please name an equivalent-sized economy and market without patent laws which didn't also see the invention anti-cancer drugs? Your stance is one of
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are obviously not in the medical business.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity.
Dont forget aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health! Would never happen without patents.
Oh, did I mention Shakespeare would not write anything without Strong Copyrights?
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
p>No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity.
Really? Most fundamental medical advances are created in academia, mostly with public money. Many companies just take the relatively small step to a commercial product. William H. Oldendorf would have done his pioneering work on the CAT scan, whether there was a patent system or not. Indeed, looking at his wikipedia biography, he worked in public institutions for most of his life.
Re:Been saying that...Wrong, Simply Wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
You are wrong. Anyone can copy your patented work and market it if they have a larger legal budget than you do.
I (and my business partner at the time) came up with a unique way to solve a problem. We patented it, and began selling product. We sold several thousand instances of said product and a big US company (we were a Canadian company) came along and duplicated our product, and began selling their copy for less than our parts cost. We had our lawyer send a nastygram, including our patent for reference. We received a reply from their legal department that said "We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated "... Our lawyer said that was lawyer speak for "come and get us, if you dare.". The best we could do was prevent them from exporting their product into Canada but since 95% of our customers were US based, we were screwed and eventually went out of business. It was estimated that it would take 5-10 years to fight and probably on the order of $1M.
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"Even if the Wrights had somehow managed to patent the whole class of powered, fixed-wing aircraft,"
The way their longitudinal control patent was interpreted, that's exactly what they had. Look at the Wrights vs. Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss used a completely different mechanism for roll control, with a different control layout (both of which are basically the industry standard today), but he was not allowed to sell his products because they infringed on the Wrights' patents related to their (inferior) wing-war
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Of course you could solve the same problem by pealing back the red tape as well
In pharma, that red tape is known as "making sure the drug doesn't outright kill you." It's not perfect and it's currently being gamed, but the red tape is absolutely necessary.
The other problem with pharma is that the red tape is only necessary for the first person to do it. Thus, if the patent system goes away but the red tape stays there, then innovation will disappear completely because everyone will jump on the new drugs with generics and no need to recoup the costs of making sure it doesn't kill pe
you have that backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
The big corps will buy the senators and reps to make sure it NEVER happens.
You have that exactly backwards. Large corporations would prefer to have no patent system at all. To a large corporation a patent is a barrier to profit. A patent prevents a large company from making a cheap clone of an existing product and selling it to unsuspecting consumers at a profit. The reason why companies are buying up each others' patents is only to protect themselves; they would just as soon see the patent system go away entirely. It has brought about an arms race between companies, where none of the participants actually want to partake in the race - however they can't afford to abandon it either unless they know everyone else will do the same. And the only way to know that is to have everyone forced to do it.
Re:you have that backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a middle ground is the more prudent course of action. I actually wonder if this suggestion was put out there as a starting point to begin negotiations. I'd certainly love to see us do away with software (since that's copyright IMHO), and business practice patents. But, I'm willing to bet that there are still plenty of justifiable reasons to keep patents for new inventions. I'm also sure we can reasonably debate how long these patents should be good for, and also address the processes of attaining one.
I don't think the *only* reason companies are buying up other patents are for protection. I think we all know some cases where they're being bought up for the purpose of going on the offensive. There are also many patents out there that are even serving their original intent too, I'm sure.
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Yes, and most of those "defensive offensive" suits are filed in East Texas, coincidentally, right?
Come on, think. Why do the more legitimate corporations NEED a defense? The only reason they need defenses, is because there are scumbags out there trying to get rich off of other people's work, and other people's investments. There are predatory people who have incorporated themselves, with the sole purpose of finding, and acquiring useless, stupid, obvious patents, for the purpose of raping legitimate busi
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I'll take some of whatever you're smoking. Patent law is overwhelmingly used for offensive strategies, as opposed to defensive strategies (as you claim). And the vast majority of invocations of patent law are performed by mega-corporations, rather than the little guy (as you claim).
It is almost too ironic that you told the guy above you that he "has it backwards".
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Yes. Large pharma companies famously hate the patent system. They would much rather generic versions of their new drugs be available as soon as they get FDA approval. All that lobbying Pfizer has done to get patent laws strengthened and to try to convince the US government to pressure other countries not to allow generic nelfinavir was in some parallel universe.
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And they have no cover from being sued for harm to right? They can't argue that the FDA approved it so it's not there fault. So there's no need to prove the hid the risks just that the product did harm. And of course if the product doesn't actually do the things they claimed it does they're open for suing as well - again with no "the FDA approved it" excuse. I doubt they'd take that option (well the make a quick buck and run away subset would).
It's a bizarre exchange you propose in the first place though. T
Re:you have that backwards (Score:4, Insightful)
You have that exactly backwards. Large corporations would prefer to have no patent system at all. To a large corporation a patent is a barrier to profit.
In the software world - maybe. My world is pharmaceuticals and patents are needed, and should maybe even be extended in some cases. It isn't like the software world where companies buy patents for the purposes of some weird legal warfare. For pharma, patents represent a way for them to recoup the R&D costs made on a drug. Patents need to exist for pharma since there is such strict testing before it can be used on the general public. All this information has to be handed over to the government, where it doesn't remain a secret. No patents would kill new drug development in a heartbeat.
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The complete abolition of patents is not a problem for the already powerful industries: they can reverse engineer and copy the small inventor before he can set up a supply chain for production of his items.
In a nutshell: stupid patents used to own markets through extensive portfolios is ideal, no patents is ok. A system of serious patents empowers the individual inventor/small lab, which would be good for society, but a constant in human history is: stronger groups taking away weaker groups' freedoms.
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Hooray for racism in disguise! Why, exactly, does it matter whether these villains of yours are white or not?
Watch... (Score:2, Insightful)
They're careers will be systematically destroyed.
Not to mention what they say, even if perfect in its documentation and rationality, will just be ignored.
Economists that don't toe the corporate line of thinking get booted.
Re:Watch... (Score:5, Funny)
Just to head off the obvious troll being obvious.. I messed up and did not use the proper version of "their." Soooo sorry.
Oh Give Me a Break (Score:5, Insightful)
They're careers will be systematically destroyed.
This was published in September of 2012 [stlouisfed.org] by the St. Louis Fed, when can I expect to see their careers systematically destroyed? Does that take longer than five months to walk someone out of such a highly visible position? Even Richard Stallman cited this [slashdot.org] when he responded to one of my questions.
Not to mention what they say, even if perfect in its documentation and rationality, will just be ignored.
After reading much of the report, I don't think it is "perfect in its documentation and rationality." While it brings up great examples of serious problems with the US Patent System (like software patents, the poster child for all that is wrong with patents), it does not examine examples where the patent system has worked. It seems to pretend like patents have never done anyone any good ever. Nor does it discuss how we would have to revert to trade secrets and lying awake at night wondering if one of our employees had just brought a bunch of documents over to our competitor for an undisclosed sum -- which employee would you charge with corporate espionage? All that fun stuff is completely ignored so I would consider the report lacking in thoroughness. They also spend a lot of time discrediting studies that claimed patents are beneficial which is all well and good. It doesn't follow that patents are completely bad, however.
Economists that don't toe the corporate line of thinking get booted.
I don't think that's true. I think it's true that economists who attack corporations for the sake of attacking corporations get booted ... but that's just because they let personal biases get in the way of research. It's odd, Blodrin and Levine actually cite a bunch of cases where the big corporations got bit in the ass (like the Motorola, Samsung, Apple, etc cell phone patent fiascos). So, you know, I think that patent reform (and maybe abolition) is actually starting to look beneficial for many corporations that want to expand even further.
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as if Economies are in a fixed sphere with a fixed about of water that given enough release of pressure we level out and stabilize
fixed no, but if you don't see for example outsourcing as a process of leveling out on a global scale then i don't know what to tell you. Trade is arbitrage and arbitrage is taking advantage of inequalities not unlike a watermill taking advantage of water flowing downwards or a lightbulb glowing because the electric current wants to level out the difference of electric potential
The overwhelming majority of global economists is occupied with redefining the units of currency (apparently hoping that people won
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: not having patents would confer significant, often insurmountable advantages to large corporations.
I do advocate patent reform, but outright doing away with it will be bad for all but a handful of people at the very top of the corporate ladder.
Re:Watch... (Score:5)
Actually I'm a strong conservative and I entirely agree with them. It's the simple truth and the patent system is destroying this country. I think it's so screwed it needs to be done away with and rewritten from scratch. There should be some protection for real inventions but this incremental, "we modified this so it now works this way" bullshit needs to go. Software patents need to be totally abolished. During the early days of software development before the patent nightmare we now endure there was rapid growth. Have an idea? Go for it! Now it's have an idea, call the lawyers.
Furthering class warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
And when you accelerate the acquisition of power, you encourage oppression in the name of profit. This leads directly to fascism for the people.
Re:Furthering class warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
This might be true in a society where the corporate elite can use the court system as a weapon.
Re:Furthering class warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
At one time it did that, now it does not.
Go pantent something as the little guy, they big boys will then patent every use of your thing they can think of or tie you up in court until you are bankrupt.
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Examples, please.
Re:Furthering class warfare (Score:5, Interesting)
Examples, please.
Philo T. Farnsworth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth [wikipedia.org]
Basically invented television, then RCA under Sarnoff stole it. I don't think he ever went bankrupt, but his laboratory equipment was repossessed. All and all, he spent much more time in the courtroom than any inventor should.
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Invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Showed it to the big 3, they said no thanks, but then installed them anyway. Successfully sued Ford, but it took 12 years. Spent the entire amount suing Chrysler who took it all the way to the supreme court. Lawsuits against other manufacturers were dismissed for technicalities (by then he was acting as his own lawyer).
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The patent system, for as much as it gets bad press, offers the little guy (independent inventor) a chance to get ahead. With no patents, anyone with money can make a clone of an existing product and do whatever they want with it, including selling their clone as the original item.
That's the theory, yes.
The practice is that the wealthy just use the patent system as a weapon against small guys to achieve the exact same thing.
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Sure that's another option. A much harder option since working out the details of a new system isn't trivial. An option that would take much longer.
Why not remove it and then work on adding back a fixed version. That way you get the quick fix now, and you can still have the better fix later. You also get to observe the effects of not having the system at all which will be of great benefit when designing a new system.
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How's this for a way to fix it:
After the second (or third) year, patent damages are limited to 20 times the amount the patent holder pays as patent fees. The patent fees are voluntary, you pay as much or as little as you want and you can only increase the fee by 25% in any given year.
Under this scheme nobody can afford to sit on huge piles of junk patents and collect any real court damages from them. People will only pay large fees (and be able to collect large damages) for patents which are earning real mo
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From the perspective of many economists, this is not a problem for the overall economy. I've noticed that they tend to view consolidation as a good thing, as there are increased efficiencies due to economies of scale, etc -- i.e., better to have a big company with massive capital roll out an invention quickly and effectively than to waste capital and labor on a start-up doing the same thing and making t
Fix Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.
Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.
This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.
-- Pete.
Re: (Score:3)
Here's part of the problem with that proposal: What about inventions that include multiple kinds of components? For example, if you have a software modification to a medical device that makes it more accurately detect and respond to changes in the patient's body, is that a medical device invention, or a software invention?
Specificity of scope of improvement (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I have my own ideas about patents
You should hurry up and patent those ideas...
Hollywood accounting (Score:2)
Accordingly, the length of a pharmaceutical patent should be set not to a fixed term, but rather should expire once the inventor has recouped their R&D costs and some fixed amount of profit (maybe R&D costs + (R&D costs * 10%)).
Most compounds that begin investigation fail to be approved as drugs. Which failed compounds will a pharmaceutical company be able to charge against a given drug's R&D costs? When you start tying things to profit amounts, you'll see "Hollywood accounting" as companies perform various tricks to limit the paper profit.
duplicate? (Score:2)
Didn't this get posted last fall? (Maybe last summer)?
In other news... (Score:2)
Cows argue that McDonald's should be abolished.
What About Copyrights? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
An author won't live long enough to complain (Score:2)
Create something worth copyrighting.
And get sued for accidentally having re-created something that someone else has copyrighted. Independent creation is difficult to prove, and such a legal defense may be cost-prohibitive anyway. What steps do you recommend taking to prevent another Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music?
Then bitch about it being too long under your legal protection.
On the one hand, you may have just described an impossibility because copyrights already last for decades after the author is dead. By definition, an author won't live long enough to complain. On the other hand, a time-delaye [creativecommons.org]
Begin the Countdown (Score:2)
I give it three days before they're fired.
Not news (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dMuGnFdQ0s [youtube.com]
Abolishment is stupid (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The guilds are now corporations and the thugs are lawyers. Other than that, I don't see that much has really changed.
Apple is in full agreement (Score:2)
Apple is in full agreement with this except where they are concerned. So they are asking for exemptions which enable them to continue to leverage rounded rectangular patents and trade dress against everyone else.
I say this largely because Apple has said as much in its legal filings you can read over at Groklaw. It's rather ridiculous to read how they feel patents which represent actual R&D and inventions of original technology should not be eligible for protection while their software based stuff shou
Explore All Extremes (Score:2)
Ch-ch-changes (Score:4, Interesting)
Incremental changes might be a better idea. Two such changes, for starters:
Loser Pays. In Europe, when a patentee files an infringement lawsuit and loses, they are liable for the defendant's court costs and attorney's fees. In the US, unless the suit was frivolous (and this is a high bar to meet), each party pays its own costs.
Compulsory Licensing. Consumers lose when a patentee uses patents to exclude other innovation from the marketplace. Rather than allowing a patentee to exclude others from producing an infringing product, allow infringers to continue paying a reasonable licensing fee. Essentially FRAND, but covering all patents.
Reform would be better (Score:2)
Patent applications are abused right now. There's too many vague patents out there, and many have prior art. The time to invalidate a patent, and cost of litigation just makes patent law ridiculous.
Patent applications should be screened much more thoroughly, but of course, this just means that it would take longer and be more expensive. Something needs to be done, but abolishing patents is not the way to do it.
I don't agree for the most part. (Score:2)
The current interpretation of a patent is one where a company leverages an innovation against their competition, either by blocking the competition from creating innovations that use or build off of, or are in some way competitive to, the said invention, or to extort obscene profits in royalties and licensing to competitors that have no choice but to use the innovation.
The reality is that patents are public disclosure of an idea which was intended to STIMULATE innovation by sharing ideas and having others
Here's an idea.... (Score:2)
Here's an idea. Any patent that comes from research that received government funding, whether through colleges and universities, tax credits, TIFF, or whatever form, has to be made available to the public proportionately to the cost funded by the public. So, if UCLA develops a new drug for Merck and Merck contributed $5M and federal and state funds (including infrastructure, support costs, etc) amount to $10M, then for every $3 Merck makes on the drug, The government gets $2 and Merck gets $1. That way, g
Writings and Discoveries are not Property (Score:5, Interesting)
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
"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."
The fact that the Constitution explicitly carves out this Congressional power, implies that there is no inherent right to intellectual "property", equivalent to ownership of tangible property. The aim is to "promote progress..." for the nation as a whole. Any legislation should be calibrated to maximize this benefit to society. This is not the same as maximizing the benefits to the authors and inventors. So the definition of "limited times" should be optimized to this objective of maximum benefit to the nation. Too short, and there is insufficient incentive. Too long, and the benefit to society is lost. I believe current patent and copyright durations are much too long and some objective rigor is needed to find the optimum times. Note that one-size-fits-all is not appropriate, and that different durations may be appropriate for different technologies and industries.
Also, the definition of "writings and discoveries" should be much more narrowly defined. Round or square corners on a phone is no benefit to anyone. Reprinting Shakespeare does not entitle you to copyright.
More Evidence (Score:4, Informative)
The most recent issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives is focused on the patent issue.
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1 [aeaweb.org]
All articles reach similar conclusions to the first (Boldrin and Levine). They have been saying the same thing about patents for over 10 years, so don't expect their careers to be destroyed or whatever other apocalyptic scenarios were discussed above. They are academic economists who have worked for a several strong research departments and feds over the years. They (and others) provide very strong evidence that the current patent system does not help consumers/citizens. That is the purpose of laws governing commerce, correct?
It is highly likely that a perfectly designed and operated patent system would be better than no patent system. Given the reality of humans running things, this is unattainable and no patents are probably better than the current system for consumers. When examining the evidence, this claim appears obviously true (to me at least, but I read the Boldrin/Levine book a decade ago). The NIH and NSF could pick up the slack in funding pharma research, and in other fields, first-mover advantage seems to provide plenty of monopoly profits for innovators.
Re: (Score:2)
So it is no surprise that some/many Economists would disagree with Patents. Those same people probably don't disagree with the copyright system. Patents are government enforced monopolies and copyrights are property...that can be replicated at no (very very little) cost.
I agree 100% with your position in patents. However, these Economists are from the federal reserve. A private entity that has been granted a monopoly by government to print money, lend it in secret at whatever rate they want and unilaterally decide how much people should charge for lending money (interest rates). The FED and these economists are the antithesis of free market.
Copyrights require no registratiojn (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's not what happened.
Neither Apple nor IBM liked it when people made clones or compatible systems. But other than being able to go after people who directly copied their software (eg shady manufacturers who made direct copies of the ROM, such as Franklin, which got sued for copying Apple's) not much could be done about it.
Apple's later systems had a more complex ROM that was more important, and combined with changes in the marketplace, generally stopped having this problem. (Showing that piracy is bette
Re:Sheer rubbish. (Score:5, Interesting)
The patent system promotes innovation. Who is going to invest years of money and time to develope new technologies if they are going to be copied by everyone else without remuneration?
Who is going to invest years of money and time to develop new technologies when, as soon as they try and sell them, they're hit with a dozen crippling expensive lawsuits from patent trolls and large monopolies who have gamed the system to secure shedloads of vague, over-broad patents?
The patent system is a nice idea that just plain doesn't work - see debacles like the Apple/Samsung war (...and lets not take sides - that is a debacle from every direction with stupid over-broad patents on both sides and a floundering jury asked to make an impossible decision). It relies on a distinction between "obvious" and "non-obvious" that can't be satisfactorily defined and is such a specialised area of law that only megacorps can afford decent representation. Anybody with the necessary polymath genius credentials to be a patent officer is going to be so bored by the job that they just end up sitting and daydreaming about riding beams of light...
If patents are taken away then maybe something is needed to replace them. As far as software is concerned that already exists - it's called 'copyright'. In the case of medicine, all civilised countries have a system of regulation and approval for new treatments, which could easily incorporate a limited period of exclusivity.
As for patents and innovation - do you like using the Internet? That was built on open source and open protocols. Do you think that would exist in anything like its current form if all the protocols had been patented by big monopolies back in the 1980s? Enjoy using your AT&T(r) Compuserve(r) Email(tm) 2013(tm) system. Not Microsoft or Apple, note, they wouldn't have existed if Bill and the Steves had been nuked by IBM patent lawyers as soon as they tried to distribute computer software.
Funny that, all those big software companies that didn't need patents when they were exploding out of their parents garages but, now they're huge multinationals with skyscrapers and dominant market positions, suddenly see them as essential to 'innovation'.
Description of the invention (Score:2)
Sublicensing, patent term, obviousness (Score:2)
Make patents non-transferable
Which would just turn assignment by the inventors into a sublicensable exclusive license by the inventors. What practical effect would that have?
Patents have a maximum lifetime that cannot be extended
This is already the case: filing date plus 20 years plus an allowance for delays by a federal agency, such as undue delays by the USPTO or delays by federal regulators for drugs and other products needing federal marketing approval.
No frivolous patents
That sounds like what the current "obvious" standard was supposed to mean, but you'll need to define "frivolous"