OK. Has this ever been true?
I remembered a story about the Wright brothers suing competitors and engaging in a patent war, instead of spending their time and energy continuing to innovate.
Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica the next day with impunity.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? These Chinese firms made open source 3D printers more accessible to the hobbyist communities, and some of them are even known for quality. Granted, some of them cut corners so much that a burning 3d printer became a meme.
3D printing as a hobby only becomes a thing once the patent expired.
I am sympathetic to the idea of the small inventor trying to make it in the world. But people, big and small, corporations and individuals, can and did abuse patents, even innovators.
It pains me that I have to explain this to adults on HN, but: yes, this is bad. The foreign investor/customer paid dearly with time and money for the research and development. The factory runs an additional night shift and makes another batch of product. They then sell the night shift products at a reduced price undercutting the original vendor because they do not have to recoup the development costs. The vendor with the higher price cannot sell his stock of product because the demand is already satisfied from the cheaper night shift product.
OK. That wasn't what I am talking about. I am talking about 3d printer vendors entering the market, not being duplicitous about it. 3d printers are often open source, completely out in the open. So you would naturally expect clones.
So there's no duplicitous dealings going on here.
There are definitely cases where an innovator gets a patent and then is able to make a successful company that makes life better for everyone, even in software (e.g. RSA). Pick your favourite small inventor success story (Dyson?) and they most likely have a patent on whatever it is they made. The argument for patents is that they make that kind of basic research profitable (including for hobbyists) and therefore encourage more of it to happen. It's very hard to actually confirm that counterfactual one way or another, but it sounds logical at least.
These days, the big guys can just trample over small ones, and use the list of patents they have as a counter-sue threat against other big guys. Small guys are constantly threatened by big guys with patent lawsuits, they can't really dream about enforcing a patent a large guy. Even if they have the perfect patent they just get bought up for it. And now the patent is part of that big list mentioned above, where it can be used for development or just sit in a drawer and have the project killed just so that competition can't use it.
Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica the next day with impunity.
There is no win, I don't see any benefit of patents in the western world today, they're only used to slow technological progress - the exact opposite of the intent.
What am I missing here? This is a very shallow take with my little knowledge, but I just don't see the benefits of patents.