Patents are a compromise: you keep your prerogative, yes, but for a limited amount of time and you agree to publicly publish it so that everyone can access it. Eventually, if you do nothing with it, why would we limit humanity from benefitting from it ?
It's like imagine a guy has a nice idea to cure cancer, but plays the princess with it and refuses to industrialize it, while people are dying left and right. Surely, it becomes indefensible, and at some point, someone brave will do the right thing and implement the idea. You have a right to reap the benefit of your ideas but you have a duty not to deprive humanity of any benefit just because you thought of it first, I feel ?
I think it's always important to keep the original goal of patents in mind. A monopoly on an invention isn't a basic human right. It's a right we as a society have determined is worth giving out only because it creates a net win for society by encouraging invention. If patents no longer achieve that goal, or if they are causing more negative than positive impact, there's no universal law of humanity that says we need to keep patents around at all.
Patents were not allowed to exist for the good of humankind. They were supposed to be ways to expose smart ideas and then we may use them all much later. More importantly if patents were to help mankind, they should be public domain.
I think patents are a big impediment to innovation.
And I think they are morally wrong. Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do?
Coming up with an idea is only a very small part of the battle. Making a viable product is much harder but also not the biggest problem.
The biggest challenge often is getting people to buy a thing. And we already have significant incentives in place for that.
There are things that we need that take a great deal of investment to discover and that cannot be protected with trade secrets.
But if the innovation is of significant value, presumably one can make a profit from it and get to market faster than the competition, so there is reward for innovating.
People that need an innovation can also create a bounty or reward for making it happen. And we have seen a lot effort in response to things like the x prize and darpa's grand challenge.
So I don't see how the alleged benefits of patents justify the curtailment of individual rights.
I'm not sure anyone would ever claim that patents are morally justified. Their justification is cultural, in a sense. They are there that invention is worth it. Invention and innovation, in turn, bring about advances for the entire culture that has surrendered these specific rights, because it sees more value in progress than in the rights that are given up for it. I don't know whether a culture without patents would still advance and have as many inventors, but on the surface, this sounds like a reasonable trade-off.
I would restrict patent law to force a patent holder to license their patents to whomever for a reasonable price. We already have that for standards relevant patents, but i think it should apply to all patents.
Ya, clearly patents are a good deal for inventors. I just think a lot of people fail to realize that it's also a good deal for society.
Without patents, who knows how many ideas would be stuck in the heads of individual people, reluctant not only to try to bring them to market, but to even discuss them with anybody. Why would anybody want to become an inventor, if there were so little upside?
Another very good reason to get rid of the unreasonable clusterfuck that are patents. Once and for all.
And magic is there to be shared. I can't even begin to imagine where we, as humanity, could be if people shared their results and benefited from incremental development off each others' discoveries instead of spending uncountable man-hours reinventing the wheel for the seven hundred and three billionth time.
Patents reward the wrong thing. They reward having the idea rather than realizing it. With regard to maximizing value for humanity this is exactly the wrong way around.
IMO patents (the idea) are not the problem, they are a reasonable system for funding the work. The problem is that while patents (the implementation) are about money they don't apply to money, they apply to the freedom to utilize the patented work.
Patents should not limit freedom, they should funnel some of the money made from the patented work back to the people who did the work. If money isn't involved the patent shouldn't come up. IE. if you aren't making money from a patent you should be free to use it as you want. To put it another way, we shouldn't put arbitrary restrictions on freedom in exchange for money.
I see very little value in patents in general, and I certainly don't think they should exist for things like fundamental research.
Patents exist as a hack to make up for the fact that markets don't deal well with situations where investment from one entity benefits everyone. Patents ensure that only the company doing the research gets to benefit from it, robbing the world as a whole from the progress which could have stemmed from that research.
Why can't we leave the markets to do their thing, and have an alternative mode of research whose funding doesn't depend on keeping the fruits of the research out of the hands of humanity? Why can't we leave companies to do whatever research they want, but put a bunch more money into public research institutions and research non-profits and the like?
If you absolutely want to keep research funding private, I can think of other options as well. Instead of making the reward a government-backed monopoly over the use of an innovation, what if the reward was, say, a direct monetary reward through tax reductions, or maybe a system where the government could subsidize products with the innovation for some time period so that competitors have a disadvantage in the market.
I'm sure someone smarter than me could think of other, better solutions. Point is, there are lots of options. Using state power to keep the innovation out of the hands of humanity seems like the worst of them.
I understand the need for patents although I really really dislike them and what they're doing on a grand scale. In the case where a small company makes a discovery but doesn't have the resources to develop the product as fast as larger companies would, I definitely see the need for a patent system. The patent basically stops others from 'stealing' their idea.
But what if the patents were limited to 1-2 years and after that it would be public domain? That way the initial inventor would gain the advantage of a head start (and 1-2 years is huge by todays standards) and only hindering global development by a year or two.
The point of the patent system is that we are giving inventors a time-limited monopoly on their invention in exchange for them sharing it with the world. We all benefit because we have access to this new invention and soon can make it ourselves, and the inventor has an incentive to promote and sell as much as they can while they own the monopoly.
But it's not working here. The patent holder is effectively saying society isn't allowed to have the invention. They're using a legal means meant to share the knowledge with the world to instead horde it away from the rest of us.
When the system doesn't work, the system must be improved. How can we incentivize inventors to not do this?
I agree that we allow patents for things today that aren't novel but patents do allow a single person to build a company around an idea. By having some protection for a time, they have time to recoup research costs and build something sustainable.
Without them, billionaires could just monitor the market and essentially just steal the business because they have the capital to leverage economies of scale. How do you prevent this without patents? What is your better idea?
Honestly, I don't think there is a good argument for patents at this point. If your thing is truly groundbreaking, keep it secret. The reward for having great ideas and successfully productizing them is lots of money; why do there need to be patents (and effective monopoly protections) on top of that?
There's a decent argument for drug patents (drugs cost a fortune to develop; makers only recoup losses if they can mark up the cost of drugs massively; competition gets in the way of that), but I'd argue this is a better argument against the whole industry and an argument for more public funding of drug research.
If you can't make your business work without patents, I think that's a bad sign.
I don't think it's feasible to get rid of patents, but I think they could (and should) be made easier to challenge and invalidate, and there should be some restrictions to discourage patent trolls (what restrictions exactly is debatable).
I would much rather that a patent not be granted until a product exists. If someone else beats you to market, to bad so sad for you. Patents exist to encourage innovation, and I don't see how that goal is furthered by letting someone sit on an idea without using it to the detriment of someone that is actually ready to do something with the idea right now.
India's setting a great precedent by granting exclusive rights granted by a patent only in combination with a requirement that the result be reasonable.
I think this kind of tweak to the patent system should be extended beyond medical life-or-death kind of products.
Our society grants these exclusive rights under certain conditions, because as a society we believe doing so benefits us all. There is no inherent natural right to have a patent (unlike what this bozo seems to believe), it is an artificial construct humans made up to improve society.
There is no reason we shouldn't tweak the parameters of patentability and the benefits received on an ongoing basis.
Patents should be about encouraging inventors to reveal their inventions and methods that would otherwise remain secret and granting them the 20 years monopoly for that. It's not a license to choose any idea that is obvious to one skilled in the art after a purely superficial observation of the device in action.
This seems like it is against the spirit of the patent system, and supporting it would be just as broken. I can get behind the thought of someone coming up with an innovative idea, patenting it, and then selling that idea for a royalty... but someone coming up with an innovative idea and just sitting on it, while stifling other people's similar intuition?
That's certainly not doing anything good for the world. It's just lining the pocket books of the idle thinker.
With respect, I think this is exactly the case people have legitimate worries about, but also the case that we must clearly refute. Why should this idea be protected? Does it benefit society? I think the answer is yes only if one person having the idea makes it get implemented significantly more quickly than it otherwise would have. But I doubt that is usually the case. It's far mor likely that either a) the idea isn't really very novel and would have been produced soon after anyway by someone else or b) someone having a patent on the idea makes those with the ability to execute on it (or the capital) do something else. Or both. Patents should only exist to benefit society, since they have the force of law. I think most of us struggle to find even single instances where that has happened.
It's like imagine a guy has a nice idea to cure cancer, but plays the princess with it and refuses to industrialize it, while people are dying left and right. Surely, it becomes indefensible, and at some point, someone brave will do the right thing and implement the idea. You have a right to reap the benefit of your ideas but you have a duty not to deprive humanity of any benefit just because you thought of it first, I feel ?
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